Pitch

by William Ollie

  “You mean all them people have known about this for all these years?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’ve been helping him steal those kids?”

  “Those kids, and us, too. But we’ve got a surprise for them sons of bitches.”

  “We do?”

  “Damn straight we do. We’re gonna get out of here and tell everybody about this shit. They’ll burn this place to the ground and throw all them fuckers in jail.”

  “You really think so?” Jimmy said, his squeaking voice so full of doubt.

  “Hell yes,” Harbus said, and hoped he was right. Then, holding a finger to his lips: “Shhhh, listen. They ain’t makin’ anymore noise. Let’s get back inside.”

  Jimmy followed him into the room.

  “Ow, shit,” Harbus whispered, as he stumbled over Norval Jenkins and fell to the ground. “Help me pull Norval out of the way before I trip over him again, would you, Jimbo?”

  They pulled the body further into the room, and then sat down on the bed, trying to figure out what they should do next. Saying they were going to get out of the basement was easy, but coming up with a viable plan wasn’t. It was so dark, they could barely see where they would be stepping, and without the torches to light their way, they’d be forced to wander aimlessly in the dark. Nothing Harbus suggested made any sense, and Jimmy didn’t have any ideas at all.

  “Shhhh,” Harbus said, pointing at a light flickering at the bottom of the door, getting brighter by the second.

  “Somebody’s coming.”

  Harbus jumped onto the floor, and Jimmy lay down on the bed, closing his eyes as the door opened and the lights came on, and Newton Hayes tossed Timmy’s blood-soaked body onto the floor like a sack of garbage.

  Jimmy clenched his eyes shut as Newton Hayes walked over to him, bent over the bed and whispered, “Tomorrow night’s your turn, bicycle boy.” Then he turned and walked away, stopping on his way out of the room to deliver a savage kick to Harbus’ stomach, laughing when Harbus cried out in anguish, then offering the writhing child an exaggerated apology: “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were dead.”

  Then the door slammed shut and the lights went out, and cruel laughter echoed through the darkness.

  * * *

  Jimmy and Harbus counted to two hundred, and then ventured into the basement.

  It was so dark they could barely see, and rather than wander too far and not be able to find their way back, they returned to the room, where they sat on the floor, hoping the lights would come back on. They waited and waited, but the light didn’t return. So they lay down and drifted off to sleep, Jimmy on the bed, Harbus curled up on the floor.

  By the time their eyes opened, it was two o’clock in the afternoon. Outside, the sun was shining, leaves rustling in the crisp autumn wind as a chilly breeze blew through the open window of a classroom at Whitley Junior High School, where E.L. Davis and the High Street boys sat in Vonda Peters’ English class, wondering where Jimmy and Jackie Pritchard were, and why Gary Harbus hadn’t come back to school yet.

  October 30th

  Thursday afternoon:

  Jimmy, shielding himself from the glaring light, looked down to see that Harbus was still sleeping. When his eyes adjusted, he saw it: Timmy Butler’s lifeless body lying a few feet from the doorway, his vacant eyes staring up at the ceiling, his chest a gory pit, his throat ripped wide open.

  Remembering last night made Jimmy shiver with fright. But he pushed those thoughts away and crawled over and closed his dead friend’s eyes. Then he closed his own eyes and said the Lord’s Prayer. At the end of his prayer, he made a request: “Please, God, take Timmy and all these other kids up to Heaven. And save a place for me… and for Gary Harbus, too. Amen.”

  He opened his eyes, and his eyes grew wide. Lying next to Timmy was Norval Jenkins’ gun belt, a set of handcuffs and an empty place where a can of mace should’ve been, no gun in the holster. But hanging in plain view on the side of the holster was a flashlight.

  Jimmy ran over and shook Harbus as hard as he could, and Harbus came slowly to life. “Huh?” he said. “What? What?”

  “Wake up! Wake up!”

  “Oh yeah, the lights are on, good deal.”

  “Yeah, and look at this,” Jimmy said, and held the flashlight in front of him.

  “Shit, Jimmy. Where’d you get that?”

  “It’s been under Norval the whole time we’ve been here.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. Let’s get that door open and get out of here.”

  Harbus pulled the knife from his pocket.

  Three minutes later they were following a bright disc of light across the basement.

  Five o’clock:

  Donnie, pulling up to the police station, got out of the car just in time to see Nathan, Walt and Johnny run out the front door.

  “What’s wrong?” Donnie shouted.

  “Your sister called. Somebody’s messing around over at Daddy’s house.”

  Donnie leaned into the Dodge, grabbed the .38 out of the glove box and slipped it into his pocket, ran to the patrol car and jumped into the backseat.

  Lights flashing, but no siren, Nathan laid down four feet of rubber as he roared onto the road. He didn’t stop for any red lights or stop signs. He didn’t even slow down.

  Donnie looked over the seat at the speedometer.

  They were going eighty-eight miles an hour.

  “She say who it was?”

  “Said she’d never seen him before. Sounds kind of familiar, huh?”

  “Jesus,” Donnie said, remembering what Thelma Porter had told them.

  “Some old man. Never seen him before.”

  They made it to the Bethel’s Holler Bridge in no time flat. Nathan turned off the bubble lights and drove quietly to his father’s home. He pulled up at the foot of the driveway, stopping several yards away from a car he had never seen before. Once out of the patrol car, he motioned Donnie and Johnny around back.

  “Anybody except me or Walt comes out that back door,” he said. “Shoot ‘em.”

  Then he pulled his revolver, and the four of them advanced on the house.

  The lights were on, and as Nathan and Walt drew closer, they could hear somebody moving around inside. On the front porch steps, Walt put his hand on Nathan’s shoulder. “Don’t shoot unless it’s absolutely necessary. He may be our only way to those kids.”

  Nathan, nodding, climbed the stairs.

  Standing at the front door, Walt Davis could hear his heart pounding, feel the blood pulsing through his temples. He’d never been this scared before, and was damn glad to have Nathan there with him.

  Nathan turned the doorknob, slowly, gently.

  Soundlessly, he followed his pointed gun into the living room, and heard somebody moving around in the kitchen. “Stay here,” he whispered, and then walked through the living room, into the kitchen, where he slipped up behind the figure, and cocked his pistol.

  “Whoa now,” Pops Burgess said, both hands in the air as he turned. “Easy with the pistola there, cowboy.”

  “C’mon in, Donnie!” Nathan shouted. Then to Pops, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

  Pops was still holding his arms up when Donnie walked into the room.

  “Mister,” Nathan said, stepping forward and pointing his gun directly at Pop’s forehead. “You’ve got about four seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t blow your ass straight to Hell.”

  “My name is Harold Burgess. I’m a detective with the Charleston Homicide division, and I know who killed your father.”

  “I.D… Nice and slow.”

  Pops pulled out his wallet, opened it and handed it to Donnie, who looked it over and passed it on to Nathan.

  Nathan inspected the wallet, and then ordered them to put the guns away. “All right, Burgess,” he said. “What’re you doing sneaking around my daddy’s house?”

  Pops lowered his hands. “I’m the lead detective in charge of those murders
over in Charleston,” he said, and then went on to explain how he and John Slaney had been called to the scene of the first murder. How he had been out of town when his partner and the other officers had been killed, and how he would not rest until John Smith, whoever the hell he really was, was dead.

  “Look,” Nathan said. “I’m sorry about your partner and those other people, but what does that have to do with my daddy?”

  “We ran our asses ragged trying to find a clue, any kind of a clue. Slaney came up with the only idea that panned out.” Pops opened the refrigerator and took out a beer. “You mind?”

  “Help yourself, and get me one, too. How about you, Walt? Donnie, Johnny?”

  “No thanks,” Donnie said.

  Pops opened a beer for everyone except Donnie.

  “We knew Smith wasn’t from our area, or even this region of the country. If he was, we would’ve heard about other murders. He didn’t just get started doing this shit. He’s been at it a long time. He butchered up that first woman like nothing I’ve ever seen, then walked into the bathroom and put his fingerprints on the mirror. Took a shower and strolled right through the lobby just as calm as could be.”

  Pops turned up his beer, guzzled down a mouthful and continued:

  “We figured he wouldn’t want to be taking taxi cabs back and forth across the city, not with what he was doing. Slaney checked out every car that had been sold, interviewed every person who’d advertised a car in the personals, went to the D.M.V. and checked back a week. All the cars that had been sold had been run through for new tags and title changes. All except three.” Pops paused to take another drink. “One of those three cars was sold to a man who fit that murdering son of a bitch’s description.”

  Pops sat his beer down, and stared Nathan in the eye. “The man who bought that car called himself Nate Hayes.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Donnie said.

  Pops waited for a question, a comment or two from his stunned audience, but they just stood there. “You called out for Donnie to come on in here. Would that be Donnie Belcher?”

  “How could you know my last name?”

  “While Smith was in Huntington, he registered under the name of Donnie Belcher.” Pops took another drink. “I kept wondering why Charleston, what had brought him there? Then yesterday I was reading the paper about the trouble you’ve been having over here. Read your daddy’s obituary. When I saw your name listed as a surviving family member—Nathan Hayes—I almost fell out of my chair. Smith hadn’t come to Charleston for any reason. He was just passing time.”

  “Hell of a way to pass time,” Johnny said.

  “That’s why we know he wasn’t here before that first murder. He enjoys this shit. Probably couldn’t go very long without killing somebody. Likes to torture his victims, this one. Son of a bitch cut the tongue out of a beautiful young woman and left it hanging on another woman’s front door.”

  Pops looked around the room. “Donnie and Nathan, John Smith knows you two boys, and he knows somebody else in this town, somebody who wanted Lester Hayes dead so bad he brought that son of a bitch from a long ways off to kill him.”

  Pops stood up, walked to the window and looked out at the nearly full moon.

  “You know,” Nathan said. “Sneaking around out here is a good way to get your ass shot. Why didn’t you get hold of me before you came snooping around?”

  “I tried. Hell, I drove up to the police station but nobody was there, called back three different times and nobody answered. I finally said fuck it and came on out.”

  “Well, like you said,” Donnie told him. “We’ve been having some trouble here lately. We’ve just got a little four man police force, and last Friday one of them was damn near killed, and another disappeared.”

  Nathan took a drink of beer, and Donnie continued, “Johnny there’s the daddy of a little boy that got hisself snatched Friday night.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yeah, I do. Mister, you just told us one hell of a story. Now we’ve got one for you.”

  Donnie and Nathan stared at each other, and after a moment, Nathan spoke up:

  “First off, there’s three kids missing now, not one.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s grab a seat. This might take a while.”

  They adjourned to the living room, Pops listening as Nathan told him about the child abductions, how they had happened every thirteen years going back as far as he could remember. The old detective took out his pen and his notepad. Every once in a while he would jot something down.

  Nathan told how he had promised to watch over his brother, and had failed to do so, how the events of 1955 seemed to have taken the life out of Earl Peters. All about Baby Charley and Bobby Turner, and that sadistic poem. He spoke of Reverend Carlton Stone, of Marty Donlan and Barney Linton, how a harmless town drunk had walked into his house, stone cold sober, only to go on a murderous rampage. He told him how his father’s killer had phoned the hospital and recited Baby Charley’s poem, word for word.

  Then he told Pops about Maudie Mason and her visions.

  Pops sat on the couch, listening. Every once in a while Donnie would nod his head in agreement. Johnny Porter sat in Lester’s easy chair, staring off in the distance while Walt Davis looked on, seemingly captivated by the strange tale. When Nathan finished, Pops had a few questions. “You say that Norval fella just up and disappeared?”

  “Told me he was coming over here to investigate the murder scene. We ain’t seen him since,” Johnny said, and then pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and tossed it onto the coffee table. “I searched his car and found that stuffed between the seats. Ain’t nothin’ there but a bunch of worthless facts. Don’t none of them add up to anything.”

  Pops picked up the notebook, the sum of which seemed to be an exercise in the obvious. The last two entries aroused his curiosity.

  #14 - Bloody footprints in the bedroom.

  #15 - What was he doing in the bedroom?

  “What was he doing in the bedroom? Pops said. “And which bedroom was he in?”

  “My old bedroom,” Nathan said. “That’s the night Johnny’s baby got snatched. Johnny went home to take care of his wife. The next morning we found Norval’s car sitting in front of the police station.”

  Pops flipped back a page in his notebook and circled one of the notations. “Who lives in that big-assed house up on the mountain?”

  “Well, that’s another story,” Donnie said, and then proceeded to tell Pops everything he knew, or had ever been told about William Pitch and Pitch Place.

  “You said little Johnny’s mother has lived here all her life, and she’d never seen this old man before, the one that was leaning over her bed?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “You know if she’s seen this Hastie fella? Sounds like a pretty old guy to me.”

  “I’m not sure if she has or not,” Johnny said. “I’ve only seen him a couple of times myself. He don’t come out of there very much.”

  Pops scratched something down in his notes, and looked at Nathan. “You, Earl, and that other policeman patrolled the town back in fifty-five, and y’all never came up with a suspect?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about Earl?”

  “What about him?”

  “He didn’t have any ideas, a gut feeling or something? Anything?”

  “Not a damn thing. He used to say the same shit we’ve been telling ourselves. It must be somebody we all know but would never suspect.”

  “That just don’t sound like the Earl Peters I remember.”

  “What do you know about Earl?” Donnie asked him.

  “Earl Peters was from Charleston. I’m from Charleston. Back before Earl moved over here in the twenties, we knew each other. Earl was a big, tough guy who didn’t put up with any bullshit. He single handedly took on a gang of punks terrorizing shop owners on his beat. Earl went down there on his own time and kicked the shit out of them boys, a
nd they never bothered anybody around there again. That’s the way he was. I mean, look at how he tracked down those bank robbers, and what he did to them. Did y’all have a lot of crime here while he was sheriff?”

  “No, and still don’t,” Donnie said, nodding at Nathan. “He’s a pretty damn good sheriff, too.”

  “I’m sure he is, but that’s what I mean. Earl was a hell of a man, and it’s hard to imagine something like this going on for as long as it has. Not in Earl’s town.”

  “You were at Earl’s funeral, weren’t you?” Nathan said.

  “Yeah, I was there.”

  “I thought I’d seen you before.”

  Pops sighed, his face grew pale. “God forgive me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’d heard your name long before John Smith ever came to town. I should’ve remembered it as soon as I heard it again.”

  Jesus, if only I’d remembered the new sheriff’s name. The thought punched him in the gut. John Slaney and I would’ve come over here. He’d still be alive.

  Pops looked at Donnie, then over at Walt and Nathan. “You guys have any ideas?”

  “What do you mean?” Donnie asked him.

  Pops spread a hand across his forehead and rubbed his temples. “I mean, what the hell might be happening here, other than a bunch of hoodoo.”

  “Do you understand what we just told you?” Nathan said. “Every thirteen years, for the last thirty-nine years, three children have been taken off our streets. There has never been a single clue as to what happened. In all that time, Earl Peters, one of the bravest men I ever knew, never found a shred of evidence. Whoever did this back in twenty-nine is now thirty-nine years older. That would make this person what, sixty, if he was twenty-one back then? The son of a bitch that called me at the hospital didn’t sound that old to me. And you’re tellin’ us this Smith guy knows me and Donnie?”