A Living Grave

by Robert E. Dunn

  “We’re friends.”

  He laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You,” he answered straight back. “You are. Friends—” He laughed again, then sucked at the soda.

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “What do you know about me? You didn’t know about the medic thing and you didn’t know I played at Moonshines. Tell me something you do know.”

  I was blank. I asked, “What do you know about me?”

  “A lot more than you’ve said, believe me.”

  I did.

  “Truth is,” Billy went on, “you play your cards a little close to have real friends.”

  “That’s not true—”

  “Who do you trust completely in this world?”

  My father and my uncle. I thought it but didn’t say it. “Whoever comes to mind, I bet you knew them before you were deployed,” he said as if he didn’t really expect an answer.

  “Are you trying to be a jerk?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m trying to be your friend.”

  I swear it was my intention to touch the scar beside my eye. Somehow I ended up pushing back my hair. When I caught myself I was completely self-conscious. I changed the subject. “While you were sitting here being wise and handsome, did you happen to see a couple of kids running out of the trees?”

  “Yeah. They got in a car and left. I didn’t pay much attention. Something up?”

  “No. They were carving in a tree. I wanted to ask them about it.”

  “Carving what?”

  “Leech,” I said. “It’s all over in there and I wanted to know about it.”

  Billy sloshed the liquid around in his huge cup like he was making sure he had enough left for what he needed to do. Satisfied, he looked at me and began to recite.

  “Leech waits in the woods to give his gifts,

  “He lingers and waits with arrow and knives,

  “To take what’s his by hard sacrifice

  “Unburdening lovers, killers and lost lives.”

  He grinned at me after his little poem, then took a long, last pull, emptying his huge soda with a loud gurgle.

  He was right. I knew nothing about him or, I suspected, any of the other people around me. “The hell . . . ?” I said.

  For the next half an hour Billy told me the story of Leech.

  It had begun as an anthropology project by a student at Missouri State University in Springfield. He had created a monster, a semi-human creature, eight feet tall with gangly limbs. Its hands were arrow points that pierced the bodies of victims and pulled them into the mouth, which was a gaping maw of knife-like teeth. It had no other face, just the bloody red knives within the wide mouth. Leech was said to have supernatural powers and would grant followers freedom from pain and suffering if the gifts they brought were good enough.

  The idea of the project had been to show how quickly folklore and word-of-mouth culture could spread in the digital age. Once the creature was defined, the student posted stories about it online, along with blurry photos created by art students. In just a short time the stories and pictures, put up on two local web sites—one for paranormal investigations and the other focused on cryptozoology—had migrated and taken on a life of their own. In less than a year there were a dozen web sites dedicated to Leech with reported sightings and new photos. The most amazing developments were the addition of thousands of stories, poems, and songs by teenagers actively engaged in spreading the new mythology.

  When he finished telling me what he knew, Billy rattled the ice in the bottom of his cup and sucked at the meltwater. “Time for a refill,” he said.

  “How did you know all this?” I asked him. “Leech? I’ve never even heard of it until I saw the word carved on the trees.”

  “I read,” he said with a smile. “But don’t feel bad. Kids—middle-school, high-school—think of it as their culture. They like to keep it that way.”

  Billy went off, either to refill his cup or empty his bladder. I called Nelson as soon as he was gone. We talked as I drove. I tried not to ask him about the 9-1-1 call, but failed. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized that Billy had been right. Nelson didn’t want me checking up on him. I could feel it even on the phone, although he only said, “Everything is fine.”

  Neither of us said anything about the proposal.

  I was headed in to the sheriff’s department but decided to take a swing by the hospital first.

  Cotton Lambert looked like hell. His eyes were blackened and his jaw wired and swollen. He didn’t want to talk to me. It was a reasonable feeling, I thought. His room was barren. All his personal effects were logged and taken. There were no flowers or cards, not even a get-well balloon. There was nothing to look at in the room but him. So I sat and looked at him while he glared at me.

  “Do yourself a favor,” I finally said. “Get out from under this. Your boys are cooking meth. We’re going to take them down. And we’re going to get the lot of you for shooting up that RV. Depending on how it plays out it could be a reckless-endangerment charge or it could be attempted murder. You don’t have to be a part of any of that.”

  He ignored me pretty well, staring at blank walls while I hit him with questions. Not answering wasn’t the same as giving me nothing. His eyes and his body reacted when I asked about the connection between the Nightriders and Moonshines. When I asked if they had an arrangement with Middleton to crush the local bootleggers, his surly look told me yes. When I asked again about the man who shot at Middleton, he looked away without any of the attitude. He was afraid of someone.

  It went on like that for most of an hour, me asking questions and him reacting without words. In the end I asked one more time about Riley Pruitt and his involvement with Angela Briscoe.

  Through his tightly-bound jaw he said, “Uck ooo.”

  I believe I understood. Talking to some people is like a cat trying to cover his poop on the linoleum—a pointless waste of time. That’s the job a lot of the time. He was afraid of something, probably Pruitt. I’d either need more leverage or he’d have to get more scared before he’d talk. I decided to let him stew, then try again later.

  Once outside the door, I had to track down the deputy assigned to keep track of Cotton. He was drinking a soda and eating doughnuts at the nurses’ station. It was Calvin, the same man I had put on Figorelli’s driver the other night.

  “Hey Hurricane,” he said when he saw me coming. “You come to finish the job on our guy? He can still walk, you know.” Calvin laughed at his own joke and sprayed crumbs as he did. Then he looked at the nurse he had been talking with when I came up. “This is the detective I told you about, Hurricane. She lives up to the name too.”

  The nurse’s eyes widened when she looked at me like she expected me do something strange and terrible.

  Would smacking Calvin upside the head be very terrible?

  “Has anyone been in to see him?” I asked after Calvin had stuffed the last of the doughnut into his mouth.

  “Not since I got here,” he said around the fried artery clog.

  “Why are you here? I thought you were on nights.”

  “Switched,” he said, then started pouring soda into his still-full mouth. I left before the expected gastric explosion.

  Walking out the doors of the hospital I caught a flash of turquoise and silver coming from the parking lot. It was the man I had seen at Moonshines wearing the Grand Ole Opry styles. Today, despite the heat, he was wearing a black polyester Western suit with appliques of cactus and wagon wheels. His tie was actually a kerchief with a huge turquoise stone set into hand-tooled silver. He wore matching bracelets and rings. Even the tips of his boots were dressed with silver toe caps. I stopped at the head of the stairs and waited for him.

  “Hello there,” I said as he took the last few steps.

  “Howdy do,” he answered while touching the brim of his Stetson. I noticed that he was still wearing the cold-weather felt rather than a summ
er straw.

  He would have kept walking if I didn’t ask, “Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

  His motions put me in mind of a bird when he cocked his head my way and looked out from under the hat. “Well, they ain’t no harm nor no law against askin’,” he said in an accent as thick as the piney woods that it evoked. The smile he gave looked practiced. Like he wasn’t sure why it was done, just that it should be done. All in all, the man gave an unwholesome impression up close, like meeting a buzzard fresh from eating a rotting carcass. Then he pulled off the Stetson and wiped his brow with a black handkerchief that looked like silk. Out from under the shade of the hat his face took on a new cast. His eyes didn’t quite match in color; one dark brown, the other a light green. And the brim of the hat had taken focus from the protrusion of his nose. That crooked hook of cartilage completed the buzzard look.

  While he wiped his brow, then replaced the hat, his smile held. I knew there was nothing casual about it. It would hold until he decided to change expression.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Well ma’am, who are you? I was always taught, the person askin’ makes hisself know to the person approached. That’s manners, you see.”

  “I do see,” I said. “I’m Katrina Williams.”

  “That is a lovely name, Miss Williams,” he said as he reseated the hat and began walking past me again. “You have a wonderful day, ma’am.”

  “You didn’t tell me your name.”

  With a hand on the door handle he stopped and then turned back to look at me. The eyes were hard to focus on, like one was much farther distant than the other. “No, ma’am, I didn’t.”

  “Sir, I’m a detective with the Taney County Sheriff’s Department. I’m asking your name.”

  “Ma’am, the fact that you did not disclose your position put our meeting on a social level. On a social level, I may choose to talk with you or not to, as I wish. Am I not correct?”

  “Yes, sir. But—”

  “Do you wish to officially take me in and hold me for questioning?”

  “No, sir. I—”

  “Am I being detained under suspicion?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Y’all have a very good day, Detective.” He went through the doors, removing his hat again as he did. As the door closed the glare on the glass made it seem as if he disappeared into another world, one like this one but different in ways that could only be understood by following him through.

  He was smarter than his down-home accent suggested. It was probably as much a conscious affectation as the rest of him, a package wrapped up in Dollywood. Mr. Homey-as-Grits was playing a game. He wanted everyone underestimating him from the start. He could only be a lawyer.

  Chapter 19

  Even in a sheriff’s department the weekends can be quiet. Not because there is less crime, but because all the support staff are weekday employees. The building is quieter. You’d think it would be easier to work. Quiet is not always what you need, though. It reminded me of how everyone was telling me my life looked—partially occupied.

  I sat at my desk and looked around the place. Half the lights were off. Gloomy and quiet was not a good combination. It had a real Walking Dead feel. Sheriff Benson was in his office. That was a surprise. So was the closed door.

  Without exchanging words with anyone I went to my desk and did an Internet search for Leech.

  Billy was right. It had taken on a life of its own. There were dozens of pages that claimed to have documented proof that Leech was wandering the Ozarks. There were others that shared stories about the creature. Some of them read as breathless secrets from young people telling the kinds of stories that were once shared only around campfires. Some, however, were first-person narratives about personal encounters. Those were the most disturbing because the line between fantasy and reality seemed to not exist for the writers. They believed—or desperately wanted you to believe—they had seen Leech. Within that group were the truly scary accounts of those that said they had worshiped, even sacrificed, to Leech.

  All of the writers on those sites were young. You could tell by both the nature of the writing and the references they used to video games, music, and movies. All of their own pop culture seemed to be mixed up in a strange gumbo that blended everything until the pieces no longer had separateness. The songs they listened to, the games of high-definition murder, were all stories upon which they fed and that some seemed to actually believe. Leech was just another part of a scary world.

  Closing the browser on Leech, I was left feeling a little disturbed. Imagine peeking in the neighbor’s window and catching them dressed in Nazi uniforms, engaged in bondage games with little people and farm animals. The world is a much stranger place than sometimes I give it credit for.

  “Howdy there, Hurricane,” the sheriff said. He was leaning up against my doorframe. I smiled to see him but it wasn’t returned. He hadn’t come to talk with me; rather to me.

  He peppered me with questions. Why was I going into the jail to talk with Danny Barnes? Didn’t I have enough sense to stay away from Danny Barnes? Will we need to talk about Danny Barnes again? That sort of thing. I told him that I wasn’t satisfied with how that case was stacking up.

  He shrugged and said, “There is rarely any satisfaction to putting a kid in jail.” Then he said I could follow up but not to engage Barnes any further.

  Fair enough. I had plenty of other anvils to juggle. I did something then that I had never done before. I asked him about his wife. I’d heard someone say that she had been ill. If Billy had not gotten me to thinking about how I keep everything close, I would never have thought to ask.

  “We dodged a bullet there,” he said. “The biopsy was positive, but we caught it early.”

  A hot blush crept up my throat into my face. The rest of me felt cold but I started sweating. I had thought it was a gallbladder thing. At the same time I was glad I hadn’t been specific in my question and ashamed of myself for not knowing.

  “There’ll be a lumpectomy. Coulda been a lot worse. We thought at first she was going to lose the . . .” He pointed to his own chest, just below the badge, and circled his finger around. The man that could shout profanity as well as any sailor couldn’t say the word breast. At least not in this situation. I nodded to say I understood. He nodded back before saying, “We’re grateful.”

  “I understand, sir. My mother . . .”

  I didn’t finish but he knew what I meant. He simply nodded again. His eyes, though, looked at me like I was the most important person in the world for that moment. Then he was gone.

  A few minutes later I saw people I didn’t know passing through the brackish hall. They went straight back to the sheriff’s office. After a while Billy went by with a couple of other deputies. He waved but didn’t stop. They all went into the sheriff’s office and closed the door behind them.

  Between reevaluating my whole life and who I thought I was, I kept drilling deeper into Leech. There had been other kids who had been caught doing crimes in his name. Two in Arkansas had stolen money and tried to offer it up by stapling cash to trees in a wooded area. There were three instances of kids sacrificing animals, two cats and one dog. Comparing that kind of desperation and confusion to the turmoil in my own life began to make me feel downright small. The one thing I found in common among the kids described was abuse at home.

  Were Carrie and Danny both victims of abuse? And was Angela Briscoe their idea of a sacrifice?

  Wondering and thinking, there but for the grace . . . I was lost in someone else’s problems for a change when I heard a knock on my door. The noise made me jump.

  “Cat walk over your grave?” It was my friend and Moon’s lawyer, Noble Daniels, standing at the door, asking. I must have looked confused because he clarified, “It’s something my father used to say when someone was startled. It was because a cat walked over their grave. Never understood it, though. Did the cat walk over the place your grave would be or did it walk
over your grave in the future and you felt it now? Strange man, my father.”

  “Working on a Saturday?” I asked. “Strange kind of lawyer.”

  “It was my destiny to be so. Did I ever tell you I was named after the lawyer in True Grit? My father again. Thought it would ensure I was a lawyer or ‘defender of truth,’ as he liked to put it. Sometimes I wish I was the ‘litigator of big corporations’ instead.”

  “What truth are you defending around here?”

  “Working some things out for your pal,” he answered. “The one who won’t ever shut up.”

  “What?”

  “Can you waterboard someone to make them stop talking?”

  “I guess you’re talking about Moon,” I said.

  “Moon Light, you mean,” he answered. “The man with a motormouth and the sense God gave a turnip.”

  “You talk about all your clients that way?”

  “Yeah, I do. I’m a criminal-defense attorney. My clients are not the Mensa crowd but this guy—” Noble let out a long breath that sounded like frustration escaping. “You were right about this one. If I wasn’t there to control him, he would have sent himself up for ten years then brought the angry bikers in with him.”

  “You like him, don’t you?”

  “His name is Moon Light—how can you dislike that? Besides, he grows pot to support his mother. Five years from now his crop will probably be legal and he’ll be a forward-thinking entrepreneur. Anyway, the deal is good. He’ll be kicked loose Monday, charged only with growing for personal use. He’ll lose the operation, of course, but there’ll be no jail time.”

  “Deal?” I asked. Noble stood there looking at me a little too quiet and a little too long to feel comfortable. “Noble?”

  “Guess they didn’t tell you.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Moon gave up the location for the meth lab. It’s on federal land. He put names to faces and even laid out a schedule. Your office is coordinating with the Forestry Service investigators and DEA. It’s going to be a big deal. One of your guys has been on the place since this morning, confirming the location and logging activity.”