Eyes of the Predator: The Pickham County Murders (The Hunters) Read online

“Well, old girl, I guess you could say I identified the problem and organized the expedition. That ought to be worth somethin’,” he drawled back with a smile.

  The screen door banged as he walked into the house and through it to the kitchen. A minute later, the door banged again.

  “Think you’re makin’ enough noise? Not likely you’re gonna sneak up on anyone with all that door bangin’ goin’ on.”

  “What makes you think I’m trying to sneak up on anyone? I want them long gone by the time I get there. No need to be overly ambitious or under cautious about such things.” He smiled at his wife, still seated in her chair.

  He clicked on the flashlight and shined it across the yard toward the tree line. The batteries were old, the light dim and yellow.

  “Better hurry,” she encouraged him. “Not much light left in them batteries.”

  “Yep. I better get movin’.”

  When he was half way across the yard, an uneasiness bubbled slightly inside her and she called out from the porch, “You take the gun?”

  He turned, and reaching behind, the old man pulled the .38 Smith and Wesson, two-inch barrel revolver from his back pocket. He held it up for her to see as he walked toward the trees.

  12. Appetizer

  He smiled again as he jerked the girl roughly to her feet. The knife was at her throat. His body pressed hard against her forcing her against the side of the car.

  “Don’t make a sound, sweetheart. Do you understand?” The grin was still on his face.

  She nodded slowly, trembling.

  “We’re gonna have a little fun. Then I’ll take you somewhere and drop you off. You can find your way home. Right?”

  Again, the slow, trembling nod.

  He glanced around and saw no lights through the trees surrounding the church. Just woods and dark. Reaching into the car, he retrieved a roll of duct tape he had conveniently placed under the passenger seat. No need to worry about being spotted now.

  With a quick motion, he circled the girl’s face with the tape sealing off her mouth and any possible sound she might make other than the soft, muted whimpers she was trying to control. Her fear and pathetic effort not to make any sound as he had instructed sent a thrill through his loins.

  Roughly, he jerked her away from the door and pushed her towards the front of the car. With one hand, he grabbed the back of her neck and pushed her over onto the hood of the car, banging her face against the metal. He knew she could feel the heat of the engine radiating through the hood onto her face.

  The knife went down the back of her pants slicing through them and the panties beneath. She gasped as the cold steel continued down between the cheeks of her buttocks and rested there for a moment. A shudder ran through the man as he leaned against her, and she sobbed more heavily.

  Stepping back, he looked at her pale skin just visible in the dark. Her bare, trembling white buttocks gave off a ghostly luminescence. Opening his pants, he moved back to her. This time, she would have screamed had she been able.

  It only took a couple of minutes—painful, terrifying minutes for the girl. After, he stood quietly in the dark, leaning against her still trembling body. The powerful heat and force of his attack on the girl faded into a satisfied warmth. It was not the afterglow of a pleasant sexual encounter. It was the desperate relief of drinking after a trek through the desert without water. This had been the appetizer for what was to come. Soon, he would experience the belt loosening feeling of feasting after a long fast.

  He could feel her trembling in fear against him and he drank in that which he had missed and needed so much. Leaning against her, he savored the feeling and her terror.

  13. A Walk in the Woods

  “Maybe we should just call the sheriff,” she called after him. “You might be too old to go traipsing through the woods in the dark.”

  “I’ll be alright old girl. Most likely just a raccoon pulling on the old back screen door, or some youngsters looking for a place to park” he called back. And now he was determined to check things out and show his woman that after sixty odd years of marriage, he was still a man. Maybe an old shriveled up man, he chuckled to himself, but a man nonetheless.

  At the tree line, the old man stopped for a moment looking for the small path that led about a hundred yards through the woods to the back of the old church. Finding the entrance, he threw one backward glance at his wife, still sitting on the porch. She watched him, and then conscious of his glance, looked back down at her cross-stitch work.

  He scanned the ground ahead with the flashlight. Most anything out would scurry away as he approached, and there wouldn’t be any gators here. No water nearby. But snakes…there were lots of them, and they tended to lie on the paths at night in the cool air. They weren’t very active at nighttime, even in this warm climate. But they could get downright mean if you stepped on one in the dark. He was careful as he walked. He didn’t like snakes.

  Emerging from the woods, he clicked the flashlight off and stood quietly at the edge, trying to blend in with the tree line. Without the light, he would be nearly invisible from a few feet away.

  He could make out the church across the rear gravel lot. Nothing seemed out of sorts and he could see no one. Walking as softly as he could through the gravel, he went to the back of the church building. The crunching sound his shoes made in the rocks caused him to wince at every step. Clicking the light on for a few seconds, he could see no signs of prying on the back door.

  He walked around to the front of the church, trying to stay in the narrow patch of grass surrounding the building so that his steps were muffled. The windows seemed intact. At the large double wooden front doors, he checked again with the flashlight for any signs of a break-in. There were none. The two large, wooden doors revealed chipped and peeling white paint, but no signs of prying or other damage. He stepped from the church’s front porch.

  Crossing the gravel lot to the road, he could not make out anything unusual. No way to tell if anyone had pulled into the lot. The gravel didn’t hold tracks, and he wouldn’t know what to look for if it did.

  Shining the light around from the driveway of the church, he could see nothing unusual. The light sparkled brightly back at him from the reflectors marking the centerline of the road in front. No traffic, but that was not unusual here. In fact, any traffic would have been unusual this time of night. Something scurried in the brush across the road. Probably a possum, or maybe an armadillo.

  Okay, so much for his adventure. Time to get back to his porch and his chair. Turning, he circled around to the rear of the church and the path leading through the woods to the old house.

  Stopping at the edge of the woods, the old man scanned the building and lot one more time. The air was becoming thicker and damper as the night came on. A mist seemed to rise from the ground enveloping the base of the church, like something from a spook movie, he thought. An involuntary shiver crawled up his back.

  Silly old fool, his wife would say, and she would be right, he thought. Enough. Definitely time to get back to the front porch. He turned and clicked the flashlight on as he swung around and started to step gingerly back into the trees. The dim, yellow beam of light reflected off something about a hundred feet away, and he stopped in his tracks.

  Squinting, he could make out that it was a car backed up against the woods, almost hidden by them at the rear corner edge of the lot. It looked like an older car and dull in the beam of the flashlight. The type of car someone from around here would drive.

  Peering intently at the ground for snakes, alert to anything that slithered, the old man thought for a moment about going back into the woods and the comfort of his porch chair. An old car left in a parking lot in these parts wasn’t all that unusual. In fact, it was pretty common. Probably one of the church goers broke down on Sunday, or some kids laid down in the seat waiting for him to leave. That thought tweaked his curiosity.

  He stepped back onto the gravel and walked along the edge of the woods towards the c
ar. The shadows of the trees made the corner of the lot where the car sat much darker so that he hadn’t noticed it as he walked from the woods. He had been focused on the church building. He still wouldn’t have noticed it if the flashlight hadn’t reflected dimly off the car’s glass as he swung around.

  14. Ambush

  Somewhere a door had banged shut. It was a muffled sound and seemed a long ways off. Swiveling his head, the gray eyes scanned methodically in all directions. No light. No movement. But the sound had been unmistakable.

  Roughly but silently, he pulled the cut clothing up around her waist and pushed the terrified girl into the car, binding her once again to the seat frame. His fingers left purple bruises on her arms. Putting his finger to his lips, he leaned close.

  “No sound,” he whispered. “No movement.”

  He stared at her with his eyebrows raised expectantly until she nodded her understanding.

  Quietly and carefully, he moved into the woods.

  The dim, yellow beam of the flashlight emerged from the woods, wavering from the shuffling gait of the person holding it. The beam swung widely back and forth, as if searching for danger, but not truly expecting any. The dim light detected no trace of the man in the woods. He was invisible to the person holding the light, and would have been difficult to see in broad daylight.

  He watched as the yellowish beam from the flashlight made its way around the church. The person holding it shuffled to the woods, and for a moment, it seemed it would disappear into the dark trees. But then it hesitated and swung in the direction of the car. After a minute the light bounced slowly up and down moving deliberately towards the old car and the unseen man in the woods.

  Avoiding directly looking into the light, he allowed his night vision to give him a picture of the intruder. The silhouette and shuffling gait were that of an old man. An animal growl grew inside him. Outside there was only deadly silence.

  Approaching closer, the old man shined the light through the windshield. There was nothing visible. Stepping up to the old car, he bent over with the light to peer inside. ‘Reckon what the car’s problem is,’ he thought, unconcerned. The danger so close raised no hackles on is neck, no psychic warning, or premonition from the Almighty. It was just an old, empty car in a parking lot.

  A startled breath escaped him, and he almost jumped back.

  The girl, bent over sideways so that her head was below the window, had her hands tied and bound with something he could not make out. There was duct tape around her mouth. It was like something from a movie, and in the few seconds it had taken to approach the car and see what was inside, the old man really and truly wished he had let the old woman call the sheriff. He very much wanted to be on the porch of his house waiting for a deputy to come shine his lights around and make things right with the bright spotlights and not this dim little flashlight. What had he gotten into? It was less than a second before he discovered the answer.

  He raised the light slightly, and the girl’s eyes widened. It wasn’t the light that seemed to frighten her. The eyes were focused on something…behind him.

  Instinctively the hand not holding the flashlight started to move backwards towards the pistol in his pocket. It was too late.

  Searing pain burned through his right kidney. Piercing the old man’s body to the hilt, the knife’s eight-inch blade penetrated completely through his thin frame, nearly protruding from his abdomen.

  With his arm around the old man’s neck and mouth, he worked the blade back and forth, in and out, as the frail old body quivered at the pain and the shock of the knife’s movements through his flesh and organs. A high-pitched wheezing sound escaped from his lungs followed by a gurgling, rattling sound. The attack was too sudden for him to struggle, and the placement of the blade was expert enough to be a death blow. Not a quick merciful death, but death nonetheless.

  After a minute, the quivering and feeble struggle ended. The old man’s body crumpled to the gravel. Blood oozing from the wound thickened in the sand mixed with the gravel.

  The attacker stepped back and examined his work. Unexpected, he thought. Unexpected, but not unpleasant. It was a bonus, and he smiled at that.

  He retrieved the small pistol from the old man’s back pocket. He had felt it as he leaned closely, almost intimately, into him during the attack.

  The girl looking up from the seat of the car could see him, although she could no longer see the old man who had peered into the car a few moments ago. Their eyes met, and the terror reflected back at him from the girl’s eyes brought another surge of fulfillment to him.

  Tears fell from her eyes but did not touch her cheek. They dripped, slowly at first, and then more rapidly across the duct tape covering her mouth and face until they plopped onto the car’s seat. He found this somehow exciting. The only thing she could produce now was tears, and she was even denied the sensation of feeling them course wetly across her face. They rolled from her eyes to the duct tape to the seat, and she was denied the wet, weeping release of crying. The thought made him feel more powerful.

  Opening the car door, he plopped loosely into the driver’s seat and let the door slam shut. The engine started smoothly, and he pulled slowly around the church with the headlights off. Stopping by the road for a moment, he made sure there was no car approaching from either direction. He pulled onto the black two lane, headed for the interstate.

  *******

  The old woman on the porch lifted her head. The sound of the closing car door came muffled, but discernible through the hundred yards of black woods.

  “Harry, is that you?” She knew her frail voice would not carry the woods.

  Silently, hands folded in her lap she waited, peering into the dark woods at the edge of the lot of the home she had shared with her husband for sixty years. He would be back soon. ‘The old fool’, she thought.

  *******

  She was bound again to the seat frame. Her eyes had the look. He had seen it many times before. The look pleaded with him to drop her off now as he had promised. It was pathetic and stupid.

  She had just witnessed the murder of the old man, someone who might have been able to help her. Could she truly believe that he would keep his word and release her, as if he had ever intended to do so? The need to survive, the longing desire for her life not to end overpowered her reason. It made her hope for the absurd, her personal survival. Somewhere inside, the synapses of her brain fired electric impulses that shut down reason and made the hope for survival her reality. Her desperation to survive made the absurdity of her circumstance invisible to her.

  Pathetic and stupid. And it thrilled him. The terrified, begging look in her eyes. It was the same look he had observed once watching a documentary show on African wildlife. The gazelle, hanging from a leopard’s jaws, stunned and crazed with fear, eyes wide open, had that same pleading look. The animal was still alive, legs trying to run and twitching in the cat’s mouth. Not dead…yet.

  The car’s taillights disappeared. At the edge of the lot where the trees bordered the gravel, the thin, frail form of the old man quickly bled out into the dust. The few remaining years of life that he had possessed had been stolen from him by the predator. The cold steel of the knife burning hotly as it sliced through kidneys, arteries, and organs had torn the life from him.

  *******

  In a supermarket parking lot, some miles away across the Florida state line, ice cream melted in a plastic bag on the seat of a small Japanese car.

  15. Backup

  A tunnel of dark green embraced the truck. The headlights cast a long beam of light down the tunnel of trees so that leaves and grass swirled in kaleidoscope patterns where the light illuminated. Beyond the shoulders of the road, little could be seen The heavy, humid aromas of the vegetation blew rushing through the interior. He savored the smell, rich and pungent.

  He loved this time of night. Mist rose from the creeks and depressions in the ground. Unseen life moved, chirped, and scurried everywhere. It could be hea
rd even through the rushing noise of the pickup.

  George turned his head and spat a stream of tobacco juice, some of which actually made it beyond the door of the truck to hit the road with a splat. Squatting on the centerline, a lizard dodged the brown liquid as the pickup rushed by with a muffled roar. Undeterred, the small green reptile darted to the shoulder and the safety of the brush.

  The radio crackled and spoke in a tinny female voice.

  “302. Meet a woman at 715 Power Line Road in reference to a missing person, her husband. Subject is a black male, five feet, eight inches, thin build, seventy-nine years of age.”

  “10-4 Dispatch,” another tinny voice, this one male, responded.

  Located in southeastern Georgia, the I-95 corridor cut across the eastern edge of Pickham County. Most of the businesses and developed areas were along the interstate’s path. The remainder of the county was primarily agricultural. Farms and small settlements dotted the landscape, with the occasional country store or tractor supply business located at a crossroad to provide service to the locals.

  During the day and evening shifts at the Sheriff’s Department there were three or four sheriff’s units working the county. Those working the day shift were numbered 101 through 104. Evening shift units were 201 through 204, and so on. On third shift, George’s shift, they called it Morning Watch; there were never more than two units working, and some nights, only one. Morning Watch deputies had to possess a high degree of self-reliance. Back up could be a long ways off, as much as an hour away. It depended on what the Georgia State Patrol troopers were doing, what section of the interstate they were working, and which truck stop diner they had gathered at for their coffee and breakfast. The gathering was a ritual that took place at precisely two a.m. every morning. George reckoned that between two and three in the morning you could run a NASCAR race up the interstate through Pickham County. All the troopers from the surrounding fifty miles were gathered somewhere for pancakes.