The Hunters Series: Volumes 1-3 Page 5

  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 heard 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.

  The troopers were pretty good boys. They backed the various counties’ deputies in their patrol areas and the deputies reciprocated. The relationship was cordial, and with some of the troopers, it was downright friendly, as many of them had gotten their start in small county or municipal departments before moving to the State Patrol.

  Before his divorce, George had thought about taking the exam and moving to the Patrol. Thinking was all he had done though. Darlene had wanted him to make the change. The pay was better. After a while, Darlene had tired of waiting for her husband to move his career ahead, although she had never considered policing much of a career anywhere, including the Patrol. Still, it was a step up from Pickham County, and she expected her husband to be as upwardly mobile as he could be given his limitations.

  George told her he was waiting for the right time to make the change, and told himself that he preferred doing something besides traffic enforcement and drug interdiction stops on the interstate
. In reality, it boiled down to the fact the he was home, and he really did not want to be anywhere else. It wasn’t until Darlene left with the girls that he realized he had waited too long. He told her he would apply for the Patrol if she would stay. She told him he was too late. He was always too late.

  “Dispatch, 301, I’ll be enroute to back 302.” George put the microphone back in its cradle.

  “Ten-four, 301,” the dispatcher responded pleasantly. George could hear the chatter of other operators talking in the background at the centralized dispatch center that was funded by various counties and public safety units in this part of Georgia. Apparently, there was not much going on, but it was still early. The shift was barely half over.

  George guided his pickup to an intersection and turned right, heading towards the missing person call. It was a ten mile ride to Power Line Road. Missing persons did not constitute emergency calls, so there was no hurry.

  The hum of the car’s tires increased in volume as he increased speed. The buzzing of the night creatures a few feet away in the brush along the road diminished as the noise of the pickup increased.

  An old car moved smoothly through the night in the opposite direction. No police officer would find any reason to stop him, especially not the one that passed him moving southbound well above the speed limit. The driver with the girl bound beside him, made his way to the interstate and turned onto the northbound entrance ramp. Disappearing into the stream of red taillights, he was more than anonymous. He was unseen and unknown, once again.

  16. Goddammit

  ‘Goddammit.’ The grizzled, old farmer waved a bony hand at her as the girl climbed down out of the bed of the aging Ford pickup. There was a deep look of concern in his eyes. ‘Goddammit,’ he thought again.

  “Girl, you be careful now,” he said out the window. The old man had girls too, and he could see that this one was mistreated. Someone had done bad things to her. It happened some around here, at least more than it should, especially if times were hard at home. The farmer was a simple man and wanted to help, but all he could think of to do was to give her a ride away from the trouble. Damn, he had trouble enough of his own. Still, he wanted nothing worse to happen to her, and he knew that plenty worse could happen. He didn’t want to think too much about that.

  “I mean it, girl. You be careful…especially about men and such.”

  “Yes, sir, I will,” she said softly, and smiled back at him. Her words sounded tired as if there wasn’t anything this old farmer could tell her about men or trouble or how they could combine together to create misery.

  “Thanks for the ride.”

  She walked slowly away from the truck into the I-95 Diner, located coincidentally, at the entrance ramp to I-95. The old farmer watched her in the mirror. ‘Damn,’ he thought, reaching the limits of his ability to articulate the concern he felt for the girl and the guilt at leaving her at the diner in the middle of the night. Just damn. He wished there was something to do for her. There wasn’t. He knew it and she knew it. He had his own troubles.

  Besides, who was he to tell her to stop and go home? Or maybe get the sheriff involved who would just end up making her go home. Anyway, she looked like she could be old enough to go off on her own if she wanted. Maybe.

  He knew it could be a far sight worse at home than it was on the road, and maybe she’d end up somewhere happier. Maybe. That was as far as his thinking would take him. He was a simple man with no solutions to complicated problems.

  ‘Goddammit,’ he thought a final time. Then, shaking his head and not knowing what else to do, he moved slowly out of the parking lot. The load of tomatoes in the truck bed had to be to market in the morning. The truck engine was missing on two cylinders, and the transmission missed a gear as he tried to accelerate onto the interstate. The girl faded in the mirror as his mind moved back to his own problems, coaxing the old truck down the highway.

  Lyn turned towards the diner. The ride from Judges Creek, Georgia, her home up to this night, had only taken a couple of hours once she had found the ride with the old man. It seemed like much longer, and her body was bone tired.

  A large moth flopped loudly against the lighted I-95 Diner window. It beat itself over and over against the window causing a shiver to crawl up her back. She wasn’t afraid of bugs, and it wasn’t the insect that caused this reaction. The moth was helpless and hopeless. It would never reach the light. It was the futility of its efforts that made her shudder. Endlessly, flopping and beating its powdery wings against the glass until it died.

  Walking through the glass door, she was assaulted by the odors of coffee and steak and eggs, thick in the close air. For a moment, she touched the two hundred and fifty-two dollars in her pocket. Her mother had shoved two hundred of it into her hand as she shoved Lyn out of the door. It had taken Lyn six months to save the balance. She considered spending some of it on a meal, but then thought better of it. Hungry as she was, she had just left and the money had to get her a long way. She would eat when she absolutely had to. She could go a long time without food. Been doing it most of her life as her slight frame and somewhat hollow cheeks bore testimony. She had always been thought of by the local boys as a pretty girl, but they had nothing to compare her with except the other local girls, all from families that struggled to get by. She had taken their advances as nothing more than boys on the rut, aching to plant their thing somewhere. After a few beers on a Friday night, they weren’t all that particular.

  There were times when feeling the heat herself, she would go with one of them. But she saved it mostly. Making those few times as special as they could be in the bed of some beat up truck. She didn’t blame the boys for being on the prowl for tail all the time.

  What else was there to do? It did pass the time, and for a few moments, it could even make you feel that there was more. It could make you feel that you and this young, hard-bodied boy could make a life far away from the pain.

  But then she knew that it could never be that way with any of the local boys. They were all like their daddies. They had all been born in Pickham County, and they would all die in Pickham County. They couldn’t see beyond it, or didn’t want to. Maybe they didn’t need to. Maybe they were happy. She guessed they were. Why not? Poor as they were, they did not live in homes with parents who hated them.

  Still she knew she was pretty, and she knew how to be sweet. She was going to let that take her as far as it could. She didn’t intend to let any man have his way with her, but she would let it go to the point that he would be willing to get her down the road a piece.

  She thought of the running away dream she and Sam had shared. He had made his escape only to return to the sandy dirt in a churchyard in Judges Creek. Lyn pushed that thought away. She was not coming back. The old house and its pain were behind her. She would have to figure out what was ahead. She would get word to Mama and send for her when she could.

  A plump woman in an apron behind the counter smiled at her. Her long, graying hair was pulled up, and there were little beads of sweat along her hairline attesting to the closeness of the night, even inside the air-conditioned building.

  “How ya doin’. Why don’t you set right here at the counter.”

  “Thanks,” Lyn sighed slightly as she sat on the swivel stool dropping the small canvas bag she carried on the floor.

  “What can I get you?” The smiling waitress looked closely at her, making Lyn uncomfortable.

  “Just some water, ma’am, thanks.”

  While the waitress moved off, she looked around trying to be discreet, but wanting to see who there might be to give her the next ride up the road. It was two in the morning, but a twenty-four hour diner on the interstate like this would always have someone moving in her general direction. North.

  She avoided eye contact with the few patrons. A couple of young men, rough looking, were huddled at a table next to the window. They looked at her occasionally, and their glances made her uncomfortable.

  A lone man, probabl
y a trucker, sat at a booth under the window. He was large and heavy, wearing a tee shirt, but his face didn’t look unkind. It was even a little grandfatherly. She had never known either of her grandfathers, but this could have been one of them. He had the look of a family man.

  Loud talking at the other end of the counter caught her attention. A middle-aged couple was arguing. It wasn’t clear what about. It seemed plain that they were both drinking. Lyn gave them another glance. If she got a ride with them, having another woman there could be a help. The arguing got louder, and the man raised his fist as if to strike the woman who raised her hand in threatened retaliation.

  “Just do it, you piece of shit. Just do it. I’ll have you in jail!” The drunk woman’s voice shrieked at the man, who lowered his fist.

  The waitress walked over to them, two cups of coffee in her plump hands and a stern look on her face.

  “That’ll be enough of that, or you can get out. Y’all just sit here and drink your coffee and let things settle. You hear?” Her voice was firm, and there was no doubt that she had run more than a few drunks, male and female, out of the diner.

  Lyn was startled at the touch of a hairy arm brushing up against her bare arm.

  The large truck driver man was sitting on the stool beside her. He leaned over close and smiled.

  “How ya doin’ tonight, sweet thing?” The man’s voice was thick and deep, like the black oil that leaked up through the ground under Daddy’s tractor in the shed. On a hot day, you could smell the oil, pungent and thick, wafting out of the shed. This man’s voice reminded her of the black oil and thick smell.

  Her mouth opened but she couldn’t think what to say. It was clear that he was not the grandfatherly type she had thought him to be at first glance. Her confidence sagged, and she knew that she must have looked like a scared little girl. The look in the man’s eye told her that that was what he wanted, and it scared her even more.

  “Hey, hon! Sorry I got distracted by them two drunks; had to take care of business ya know.” The plump waitress was back in front of her with a coffeepot and cup. “I sure am glad you stopped by to see your ‘Auntie Kathy’.”