The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3) (7 page)

I ordered her pie and played with the
silver barrette she’d left on the table. Out of curiosity, I picked up her
phone and saw that we hadn’t texted each other since October. Meaning that
since last fall, we’d spent almost every waking minute together.

While I waited I thought of the words
she’d challenged me to come up with earlier. I tried to think poetically and
lyrically. Romantically at first, then more straightforward. In metaphor and
scientifically. I approached it as John Lennon would, with a bit of clever wit,
then as Paul, all gooey and straightforward. I thought about it in terms of
Southern symbolism—warm nights and magnolias and peanuts. I thought about it as
a Mountaineer, imagining my love for her in terms of wide mountains and deep,
dark forests.

“I love you more than…”

It didn’t matter that I seemed lost
before I’d met her, or that my heart only beat half as strong, or my days were
all nights until she came into my life.

“I love you like…”

And the funny thing was it didn’t
matter. And I knew exactly what I’d say as soon as she sat back down and dug
into her pecan pie with butter pecan ice cream. I knew that I loved her like
only I could. Like only Preston Black could. A love greater than my love for
The Beatles or The Clash. Greater than my love for Pink Floyd’s
Dogs
or
Yankee
Hotel Foxtrot
.
I loved her more than my Tele. More than music, which she knew was like air and
blood to me. That my life was just quarter notes and tempos without sound until
I met her.

Her ice cream melted as I waited,
excited that I finally had something to tell her. I laid her fork and napkin on
the paper placemat next to her phone and purse. The texture of the ice cream
scoop softened as it melted, ridges turned into soft curves that caught the
light and dribbled over the sharp edges of the pie and onto the plate where it
pooled.

While I watched, the puddle deepened
one drop at a time. Bits of pecan emerged from the ice cream on top of the pie
as it melted. Eventually it overflowed, and a tiny drip fell onto the table
without making a sound.

I knew she wasn’t coming back.

I interrupted our waitress as she
counted out her tips and asked her if she’d seen the girl who’d been sitting
with me. When she explained that she hadn’t, I asked if she could go into the
bathroom and look. She hesitated and I knew that the seconds mattered. And I
dialed 911 before I even heard the bathroom door open back up.

“Brown hair just past her shoulders,
blue eyes. Fair skin. Wearing a white short sleeve shirt with a pattern of
little navy blue birds and tiny buttons. I mean blue with white birds. I always
had a hard time getting the buttons with my clumsy fingers. Um, a few silver
bracelets on her left wrist, and a silver band on her right ring finger. And
jeans and brown heels. Like, light brown. Brown like a baseball glove. And she
had on a little fake brown leather jacket with a green army-looking jacket over
top of it because she was cold.”

The dispatcher asked me to clarify.

“My jacket, because of the cold air.
And I had toothpicks in the right pocket and a receipt from a Waffle House in
Warren, Kentucky.”

The dispatcher asked about medical
conditions.

“None. Like, sometimes her blood sugar
gets low when she’s hungry and gets a little irritable, but nothing serious.”

And even when I hung up I kept
describing her. I wanted to call back and tell them all the things I’d thought
of since I’d gotten off the phone.

I’d been in the parking lot and in the
women’s restroom and all through the trucks in the lot. Talked to the drivers
and attendants and they were all helpful but nobody saw her. I called the cops
back and told them I talked to everybody here and they said they were still
sending somebody out and I told them to start looking for motorcycles. When the
highway patrol showed up I told them everything I told the lady on the phone. I
went on and on about the Circuit Riders and Boggs and the attack in the venue.
I told them all about Elijah Clay Hicks and how he came to The Met the night I
talked to Mikey Kovachick about the show at The Stink, and how Hicks went by
‘Clay’ back then. I sent them pictures of Katy from my phone and let them look
through her purse and I told them about the canyon and the rain and the hotel
back in Muscle Shoals. When they left they told me I needed to get back to my
hotel and sleep and to call Missing Persons in the morning, but I called as
soon as the police left and told them everything I told the cops and the 911
dispatcher. But I didn’t leave. Not when a chance remained that she could be
here.

Then I called Pauly and he told me I
had to call Katy’s mom. But I couldn’t. So I called Jamie to see what he’d say
but he didn’t answer.

So I called Katy’s cousin, Ben. He was
in Florida and said he’d be here in the morning. He’d call Rachel, he said.

“No, man. I have to do it.”

And when I called her I cried and kept
waiting for her to be angry. I told her I did everything I could, and she
thanked me. I told her Ben left Florida to help as soon as I called.

Then I posted it to Twitter and
Facebook. Ten minutes later I posted it again and begged for RTs and shares.

When I’d finally run out of options, I
could only sit there. The waitress brought me coffee until she went home, then
another waitress kept bringing me coffee until me and the waitress and the
other employees were the only ones left. The new waitress’s shift had begun
after it all went down and she wasn’t as sympathetic to my situation.

And the new waitress finally stopped
bringing me coffee in the small hours of the night. Between two and four.
Around the time I saw Barry Oakley paying for a fill-up and Ronnie Van Zant and
Steve Gaines buying six packs. At three June Carter went into the ladies room
and I didn’t see her come out either. When old Sylvester Weaver himself sat
down at the counter and ordered a few scoops of orange pineapple ice cream to
go with his coffee I knew it was time to leave the diner and walk the lot. All
the trucks were sleeping. I went back into the truck stop side and wandered
through the aisles of maps and Advil. The bright lights were the only things
keeping me from breaking down and losing it altogether. Somewhere amongst the
pork rinds and sunflower seeds I finally said, “She’s gone.”

I returned to the diner and laid
myself down in the booth, but did not sleep. Not with the sound of steel
guitars and two-part harmony dripping down from the overhead speakers. I tried
pulling my shirt over my face and lying with my head on the table. It felt
empty, like a sky with no stars. I didn’t know whether I felt sad, or some new
thing I’d never experienced before.

The wooden booth creaked and I knew I
wasn’t alone. I jerked myself into a sitting position. Duane Allman sat across
from me, sipping iced tea. He shook the sugar dispenser, but the humidity made
the sugar clump. When he smiled his sideburns rose like they’d just seen a
snake. He said, “What’re you going to do to shake them hounds?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what did Johnny tell you to
do?”

It took a while to catch on, but I
knew who he meant even if I didn’t want to say it out loud. “He said to go to
the crossroads.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Duane smiled.
“You’re going to need some kind of help finding her, baybrah,” before standing
and disappearing into the glare of the grocery lights, with his iced tea still
in hand.

CHAPTER FOUR

At the
end of the hall is the room where you used to live,

And now
the door’s wide open.

The
voices coming out make no sense to my ears,

I think
they just might be echoes.

“Landlord”
Music and Lyrics by Preston Black and Katy Stefanic

The
knocking went on forever. I heard it first in my dream. I remembered being a
little surprised when the noise continued long after I opened my eyes. Too bad
I couldn’t keep them open.

“Let me in, man.”

When I tried to get up I rolled onto a
large wet spot where the rest of my Woodford Reserve had spilled onto the bed.
That I drank Woodford and not Jim Beam somehow made my binge classier, even if
the smell made me sick. “Yeah,” I said, my voice little more than a rumble in
my throat, “…like it’s the fucking smell making me sick.”

Splinters of dull pain rippled through
my skull when I moved. I could only sit on the edge of the bed. I knew if I
wanted Pauly to stop knocking I had to make it all the way to the door.
“Coming,” I said, but I knew he couldn’t hear.

I slid into a standing position and
shuffled over as the wall fell toward me. As soon as I turned the handle Pauly
stepped in and ripped the drapes aside and filled the little water glasses with
apple juice he picked up at a gas station. “Drink them,” he said, then went
into the bathroom and ran the hot water.

I shook my head and tried to say
something to explain what’d happened last night. But the words got caught in my
throat like wet leaves in a storm drain.

“No, Preston. Get your ass moving and
clean yourself off. C’mon, man. Get your shit together.” He grabbed my wrist
and pulled me up from the edge of the bed. “Take your clothes off.”

“I’ll take my clothes off, but I ain’t
dancing for you.”

I started to unbutton my shirt and he
shoved the apple juice at me and said, “You need to hydrate, man. Preston, I’m
not fucking around here. Get your shit together.”

“I know, Pauly. I know.” My head swam
in the pool of bourbon that continued to slosh even after I’d stopped. I
tripped on my pant leg and stumbled into Pauly. “I’m going to get her back,
man. Watch me. I’ll cut my way through the fucking South if I have to. Just
sitting along the interstate with a gun shooting every motorcycle I see.”

“You have got to sober the fuck up. I
have shit to tell you and I can’t tell you when you’re like this. So drink the
fucking juice, get in the fucking shower and get that fucking stink off you.
You got all kinds of missed calls and I’m going to take care of those while you
get your shit together.”

“Tell me first. What you heard.”

He shook his head.

“Fucking tell me.”

“Drink this and I’ll tell you.” He
handed me a glass. “It ain’t the Circuit Riders.”

Pauly sat down in the chair at the
little desk.

I took off my shirt and dropped it
onto the floor and he went on.

“Heard over the radio the Circuit
Riders escaped custody this morning. So they didn’t do it. Boggs spent
yesterday in jail.” He poured himself some juice and sipped while he talked.
“They suspect the guy Katy mentioned—Elijah Clay Hicks. He has this cult over
where Alabama and Georgia meet Tennessee. Like she said, this guy had been
preaching since he was two or three. There’s videos of him on YouTube shouting
into the microphone, faith healing and all that. He’s the leader of the group.
All the protestors at the shows were with him.”

“You think he did it?”

“That’s who the cops are looking at
according to the chatter I heard over the radio. But if the cops get a warrant
and show up they’re never going to find anything. I guess this group’s property
holdings are pretty extensive. They’re like gypsies. They have all these camps
and stuff. Old farms. People let them live on their property. Going to take a
miracle to find her. Hicks got word out that you’re a false prophet because you
claim to have freed yourself from the devil’s grasp. They see the people who
show up at your shows as your flock.”

“What about Katy?”

“They never said anything about her.
But they stone adulterers. What do you think they’re going to do to a supposed
witch? The guy I got most of this from has a sister in-law who had a third
cousin disappear with these people a few years back. His wife is always
checking message boards for her whereabouts. That’s how he knew so much. He
recognized your name as soon as I said it.”

“Do you know where he lives? Like, if
he’s close could that be a place to start looking?”

“He’s from South Carolina. Sorry,
bro.”

I let my pants fall to the floor and
kicked them onto my shirt. “This is what I meant by hellhounds, Pauly. This bad
luck that’s never going to leave me be. Just like my fucking shadow—following
me around forever.”

“You need to shake this stupid devil
supernatural bullshit. I’m tired of you using all this as a source of your
woes.”

I finished my last glass of apple
juice. “You have to admit, shit is fucked-up despite all the good stuff’s been
happening. Like every dollar I earn costs me a pint of blood. You can say what
you want, but my life wasn’t like this before Dani and the record. Don’t tell
me it was, like that shit the other night about being heckled by fans. You know
that for as bad as things got they never got this bad. Black cats and broken
mirrors bad.”

I talked as I looked for more juice to
drink. “Katy’s gone like I drug her into all this blackness with me. Like she’s
paying a price now too. We would’ve been better off winning the lottery because
it’s all luck anyway. It’d be some other band on that stage if it wasn’t us.
I’m stupid to think hard work had anything to do with it. Stupid to think I’d
change as a person just because more people knew my name. Stupid to think all
the things that made me a shitty person before would go away once I got a
record out there.”

“Get all this out of your system now.
A little purge every now and then is good for the soul. When you get out of the
shower your head’s going to hurt, but it had better be in a healthier place. We
got work to do.”

I stepped into the bathroom and shut
the door. Steam filled the space and coated the mirror and window. It filled my
lungs and throat, which had grown a little scratchy from all the booze. When I
started to sweat I could smell the bourbon coming out of my pores. The hot
water turned my skin pink. I folded my arms against the cold tile and rested my
head on them.

Johnny Cash said I had to let the
water wash my sins away, but so far it’d only made me wet. But I continued to
let it run over me and down the drain for a long time. Pulling me out of the
alcoholic haze that got me through the rest of last night. I kept telling
myself that Katy wasn’t gone. That I’d find her. I said it so many times that
it ran through my mind like a chord long after it had been struck.

I wanted to punch the wall but didn’t
need a broken wrist.

I wanted to hang my head and continue
feeling bad for myself, but Pauly was right. We had work to do. I shut the
water off, stepped onto the cold tile.

Pauly was talking to somebody, so I
crept out of the bathroom cautiously.

“You remember to wash both your
faces?” Katy’s cousin, Ben Collins, put his hand on my neck and pulled me
toward him until our foreheads touched. His hair was still Army short but he’d
been letting his beard grow. “We’ll get her, Pres. Pauly’s been on the phone
since I got here. And I’m already making calls. Got a buddy in the Bureau.
We’re all over this shit.”

“Sorry for not being out here to meet
you and introduce you guys.” Seeing Ben made me really happy. He’d shed a lot
of the anger he usually carried with him, which meant the PTSD meds from the VA
were working. His change in demeanor would’ve made Katy really happy.

“You mean my brother from another
mother? It’s all good. Right now you don’t know whether to shit or go blind. At
least Pauly wasn’t naked as a jay bird when I met him.”

I wrapped a towel around my waist and
stepped into the room. The air conditioning gave me an immediate chill. As I
got dry clothes out of my suitcase I noticed all Katy’s things sitting there
exactly as they were when we left for breakfast yesterday morning.

“Over here, Pres,” Pauly said,
snapping me out of the moment. “We’ve been on the phone with Missing Persons
and we put that shit all over Facebook and Twitter.

Ellie at the label is going to contact
the media down here and over in Atlanta, and back in Pittsburgh, D.C. and
Charleston. Ben’s going to meet with his guy from the FBI and see if ATF can
get involved and I’m going to talk to lawyers and see if we can start the
process of getting some kind of warrant for those religious fucks and their
little freak show so we can move as soon as we find them. Got three numbers
already, one of these suits had dealings with the church before. Civil lawsuit
for a lady who’d escaped. Said they’d brainwashed her and everything.”

So I asked again, “What can I do?”

“You’re a little too sorry to work
right now. Rest up.” Ben had been trying to plug his laptop in, but couldn’t
get his arm behind the desk. His face grew redder. In a fit of anger he jerked
the desk away from the wall, spilling deodorant and phone chargers and cups and
Katy’s makeup all over the place. He tried to regain his composure as his
computer booted. “Just keep your head. Let us do what we can. If we can’t get
anywhere today legally we’re going to find this place and go up ourselves
tomorrow.”

When I woke up Pauly and Ben were
gone. Pauly’d taken the keys to my rental and I searched all over for the key
to the van. But they didn’t even leave me a room key. I picked up my phone and
called Pauly. As it rang I saw the note he left.
Meeting
with lawyer in Huntsville. Back by 5.
The call went to voicemail anyway.

I shook with rage and kept telling myself
to stop with the pointless anger. No need to go through all that again. The
time for being mad had passed. I needed to act. Sitting around waiting for the
phone to ring wasn’t going to get Katy back. I needed to know that even after
we covered the entire planet there was always going to be one more place left
for me to look, one more plan of action to take.

Maybe he had good intentions, leaving
me here like this. But he’d made a mistake by not including me. I had to be
involved, doing something instead of sitting on my hands. My skill set was
limited, and I could only think of one thing I could do that they couldn’t.

When Katy disappeared, the hellhounds
became as real as radio. I tried to remember what Johnny Cash told me that
night at the gas station. I closed my eyes but the words weren’t coming. I
fought to push all the other songs and emotions away. I had to stop thinking
about Katy. After a long moment it came to me.

First stop’s the crossroads,
the second stop’s hell
. I got dressed, even if I didn’t know where to
start looking.

“Have to see what Robert Johnson saw.”

Zeppelin and the Stones had left me
some pretty good clues. They didn’t exactly mark the spot with a big red X, but
they got me close. I was headed to Mississippi. Rosedale or Clarksdale.
Somewhere near Highway 49. I pulled my boots on and put on my jacket and
dropped my phone in one pocket and dropped Katy’s into the other. Right before
I left I wrote a note for Pauly on the back of the note he left me.
Mississippi.
Back tomorrow.

In the hotel lobby I found Clarksdale
on a map easy enough. But there were a hundred possible crossroads along
Highway 49. I wanted to ask the girl at the desk if she knew anything about
this, but she was studying psychology out of a book that contained more highlighted
pink squiggles than words. I asked if I could take the map and she said, “Yup.”

In the shelter of the carport I
studied it. Looking for clues. A warm breeze made it difficult to hold the map
still.

Another Zeppelin tune
? “No.”

Johnny Cash
?
Allmans
?
Beatles
? “No.”

Then I saw it on the map right outside
Clarksdale.

“Highway 61.” Running into Highway 49,
plain as day. “Dylan.”

Shoving the map into my pocket, I ran
across the parking lot and slowly picked my way across the four-lane divided
highway. I hopped a Jersey barrier while dodging cars, then ran through a
Krystal parking lot and down an embankment, over old shopping buggies, rusted
trash cans and broken bottles to a set of railroad tracks. A muddy wind blew
from the west, bringing dense, moist air with it, like a breath from the
Mississippi itself. I turned toward the setting sun and oncoming rain and
started walking. Gravel cobbles and creosote-soaked rail ties made the going
slow. Then an eastbound train rounded the bend and I stepped off to the side to
wait while its whistle reminded me I wasn’t supposed to be here. I ignored it,
pulled my collar up, and kept going.