Talking Dirty (Pax Arcana) (3 page)

Any one of those facts could have been significant.

The crime rate was pretty high in Porter, but so were the population density and the poverty index. I couldn’t find any references to notorious unsolved crimes or local legends or an unusual volume of mysterious disappearances or missing pets, at least not quickly. If I was dealing with a phone sex operation that ensnared victims from a distance, the people disappearing might not be locals anyhow.

I wasn’t going to figure out whatever was going on in Porter by staring at a computer screen.

Samuel was waiting for me in my truck when I came out of the post office. So was the body of Jim Reedy, the dead police officer. The corpse was wrapped securely and tucked into a cargo container designed to go on the top of vehicles. The container was airtight, packed full of ice and salt, bungeed down in my pickup’s bed, and covered with a tarp, and I still didn’t like putting a decomposing body so close to my camping gear. But I didn’t want to come back to get the corpse later either.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Where are we going?” Samuel asked grumpily.

“I just mailed a gold pocket watch to a PO box in Porter, Alabama,” I said. “We’re going to race it there.”

“Races are boring,” Samuel said. “People just go around and around in circles. Unless they crash and burn.”

I resisted any obvious metaphors.

What I hadn’t accounted for was how scary leaving Vista Verde was for Samuel. If I had given us some leeway to travel over several days, stopping at long intervals, it probably would have been a lot better, but I made a mistake. I mailed the pocket watch priority mail, and it didn’t leave us much flex time. The thing was, Samuel didn’t have the vocabulary or the wiring to articulate all of the complex emotions he was struggling with, so he expressed himself by acting out and being a total nonstop pain in the ass. I mean, I know this is supposed to be some uplifting story where I learn something about myself and the song “We’re only human” plays in the background and everybody gets politically correct points and there’s a pat ending or something. But the truth is, the eleven-hour road trip that I spent confined in close quarters with Samuel turned into a seventeen-hour nightmare. For one thing, I have a sensitive sense of smell, and the truck cab got turned into a fart festival by Samuel’s adventures in fast food. Samuel also kept changing the radio stations and podcasts and audio books and CDs that I tried to occupy him with, and he was grumbling or snarling or whining the whole time. He didn’t want to talk and he didn’t want to be quiet, and somehow he managed to not do either.

The truth is, trying to do something good isn’t always inspiring, and it often doesn’t have obvious rewards. On the contrary, trying to do the right thing is frequently hard and frustrating, and it has a steep learning curve, and it’s very easy to get discouraged and feel bad about yourself and start doubting that you even know what the right thing is. If that weren’t true, everyone would do the right thing all of the time.

I mean, just look around.

Porter was a small town divided by the Black Warrior River. On one side of the river was a main street made up of faded red brick buildings that were close to a hundred years old. On the other side of the river were a bunch of old warehouses and factories and converted sawmills that looked a bit neglected. Both sides of the river were surrounded by an outlying grid of residential neighborhoods, franchise restaurants, pawn shops, Christian bookstores, and strip malls. There weren’t a lot of woods around, and what wilderness there was existed in a thin flank along the river.

It was fall, and stepping out of the air-conditioned truck into the parking lot of the storage silo was still like walking into the breath from some gigantic dog’s mouth. My shirt was plastered to my torso within seconds, and a bug the size of a peanut dropped onto my arm and just stayed there, daring me to do something about it. I don’t know if the bug was sluggish with so much engorged blood or just couldn’t take living in Porter any longer. I flicked it off my arm, not wanting to crush something that obscene on my skin. There were no mountains around us, not even any big hills, and the temperature was close to a hundred degrees with no shade and no wind.

“Nice,” Samuel said happily, as he hopped out of the truck, taking in a breath of heavy, hot air that could have filled up a beach ball. He had perked up the moment I told him we were in Porter, going from inconsolable and angry to interested and excited in about five minutes, and I had no idea what had triggered the turning point. I had driven all night without being able to maintain a single coherent thought for more than ten seconds, and my nerves were so shattered that I didn’t know if I wanted to fall down on my knees and scream hallelujah or punch Samuel or break down and weep with relief.

So, I just grunted. “Mmm.”

Porter had a small post office, and its PO boxes weren’t open twenty-four hours a day. The lobby closed when the counter closed at five thirty. My package arrived, but nobody came to pick it up, so I had to make arrangements.

I found a thorn-laden strip of woods along the river where we could camp at night without being messed with, and a defunct grocery store near the post office that we could park behind during the day.

Relatively concealed between two large Dumpsters that no one had reclaimed yet, we were able to stay well within the GPS chip’s range without causing people to wonder why I was hanging around the post office for ten hours.

The only people who wandered by our parking spot during the day were some homeless people who were squatting inside the grocery store, and I’d brought some extra groceries as a kind of peace offering and unofficial rent. I didn’t really have to—the store’s unofficial tenants took one look at Samuel and decided to leave us alone anyway—but they would talk to people, cops maybe, or shelter attendants, or clinic workers, or missionaries, or other homeless who would talk to those people, and a little respect and goodwill didn’t hurt anybody.

Nobody came to fetch the pocket watch from the PO box for the first few days, and I spent the evenings in Porter researching the town’s history and local events. I found an easy way to keep Samuel occupied for a few hours at a time so that I could sniff around discreetly by myself. He was very territorial and task-oriented, and I told him to guard our tents and tell any cops who showed up to wait for me. It was all about the emphasis. If I had told Samuel to wait, he wouldn’t have. But he wasn’t going to leave our stuff vulnerable, and he sat sentry duty with an intent expression and no sign of impatience, drawing on his sketch pads. I felt a little ashamed. Samuel wanted to count and be included the same as anyone; he just didn’t have the tools to make that clear.

I tried the library, a couple of local hangouts, and a visitor’s center, but I wanted to talk to some longtime residents of Porter, and actually came across a clue at an assisted-living complex. I told the front desk clerk, a pleasant and plump brunette named Joan, that I was looking for a place for my autistic brother, and she assured me that younger people with disabilities lived there as well as senior citizens. I think she was being careful of my dignity because I was dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, and she wasn’t sure I could afford the place. Joan was a class act.

People were coming and going from some kind of movie in a community hall, and I asked Joan if I could speak to one of the residents for a few minutes. She hesitated for a moment, but then she saw an older gentleman walking by and cheerfully waved him over and agreed that I could talk to RJ as long as we stayed in the lobby.

RJ and I sat down in some wicker chairs, and after a few moments, I knew why Joan had agreed. RJ Quesenberry was lonely and loved to talk. I asked a few pro forma questions about the residence, but it didn’t take long to lead in to the town of Porter itself, and once I got RJ started, he was off.

“Oh, yeah, the Porters who started this town were from Greece,” RJ said in response to one of the questions I managed to interject. “They were in the shipping business.”

“Greeks named Porter?” I said skeptically.

He laughed. “I think their original name was Petropoulos. They changed it during World War II. The Greeks sided with the Nazis, you know.” He said that like he didn’t really expect me to know. I didn’t take it personally. I looked like I was in my late twenties, and somewhere in the past two or three decades, Americans stopped learning history.

“The name comes from Petro,” I offered. “Peter. Maybe the Porter family went Christian way back.”

“Huh,” RJ said. “Maybe so. I’m pretty sure their family moved on or died out back when I was a boy.”

“How about that?” I said it absentmindedly, but my brain was humming like a power line. I was pretty sure that the second half of the name,
poulous
, meant chicken, as in
pullus
for nesting chick or poultry. And as soon as I had that thought, a lot of things began to fall into place. That’s what it’s like when you’re investigating—and it really doesn’t matter what you’re investigating—sometimes answers gradually take shape as the result of careful, methodical research, and sometimes some random fact will come out of nowhere, and all of these details that were right in front of you the whole time will start coming at you in an avalanche.

When Cassidy described the voice she’d heard over the phone as a kind of singsong lullaby, I thought she was describing a ritual incantation, and because of that erroneous assumption, I overlooked some obvious things. But now all of the clues were aligning. Greek. Hypnotic voice. Female. Nesting chick. Sexually enticing men to their doom.

I was hunting a siren.

A lot of people have gotten sirens confused with mermaids, but here’s the thing: In the original stories, sirens were land creatures whose upper half was human and beautiful, while their lower half was all feathers and horribly destructive claws. These sirens—most famously in
The Odyssey
—would hide their lower halves behind rocks and cause ships to crash on the crags by singing beautiful songs that drove sailors mad with lust. Then the sirens would leap down among the wreckage and tear the sailors apart with their claws.

Mermaids, on the other hand, were half-human, half-fish women, and merfolk were harmless for the most part. There are different tribes and cultures among the merfolk just like there are among humans, though, and occasionally mermaids would act as bait. They would show their naked human half to fishermen on the shore and pretend to be in trouble, and the fishermen would take a boat out to help the “drowning” mermaid, and then some opportunistic band of mer-sociopaths would swarm up out of the water and turn the boat over for fresh meat and shiny objects. There must have been a particularly vicious tribe or bandit culture among merfolk around the British isles, because in that region, mermaids were considered evil omens of death and destruction.

Then the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen came along and wrote a story about a mermaid—a perfectly nice young woman, by the way—who traded her beautiful singing voice to a witch in exchange for the ability to come on shore, and somehow the mermaid and siren storytelling traditions got confused and mixed together until the two terms became virtually indistinguishable.

But that’s a classic case of not getting stories straight. Sirens and mermaids? Apples and oranges. Chicken and fish.

The gold watch started moving on the fourth morning after we arrived. It appeared as a dot on a four-by-four-inch digital satellite map that was plugged into my truck’s power port and suction-cupped to my windshield. I wasn’t too worried about how the setup looked—there are still people whose GPS systems aren’t built into their phones or dashboard, though they are becoming rarer by the week.

“Come on, Samuel,” I called out the pickup truck’s window. I packed up our tents every morning before the post office opened, so he was entertaining himself out in our strip of woods by doing something that caused snorting sounds. Which was odd, because he was in human form. I didn’t have to speak loudly though, and something in the tone of my voice must have triggered some hunter or defender’s instinct in Samuel, because he was there almost instantly even if he was covered in mud.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Smelling,” he said.

“You sure were.” I wrinkled my nose, and as literal as Samuel was, he got that one. He laughed loudly. I don’t know if he was being theatrical or unselfconscious, but he laughed in a way that most people don’t, full out and almost pronouncing the laughs as words.

“Come on and get in the truck.” I was smiling in spite of myself. “We’ve got to go.”

I didn’t want to risk getting stopped for speeding, so it took at least ten minutes to get close enough to the vehicle transporting the gold pocket watch to get a good look. It was a red Jeep, new but covered with mud, and the black nylon fabric top could be unzipped or unsnapped but was still on despite the heat. All I could tell about the driver was that she was female, with long black hair and smooth brown shoulders.

“Why are we—” Samuel started.

“Be quiet!” I snapped, just like a frustrated parent in line at a supermarket, and Samuel lapsed into a sullen silence. As soon as I had the chance, I went ahead and turned off on a side street, then circled back to follow the Jeep out of its line of sight. “I told you not to talk about what we were doing, remember? We’re chasing something that can hear really well.”

Actually, I didn’t know if the thing we were chasing could hear really well or not, but I didn’t want to complicate Samuel’s decision-making process with maybes.

“Why?” If I sounded like a parent, Samuel sounded like a six-year-old, albeit a deep-voiced six-year-old who cast enough shade for a small family to picnic in.

“Because I’m pretty sure it’s killing a lot of people,” I explained.

“I killed some people.” I couldn’t hear any emotion in Samuel’s voice. Not fear. Not anger. Not shame. It was there. I just couldn’t hear it. “You didn’t kill me.”