The Backwoods

by Edward Lee

  Instead, he’d come straight to the shanty.

  “Howdy, folks,” he proclaimed inside.

  No one responded, but how could they, with gags in their mouths? Trey lit the lantern; light flowed around him when he proceeded to the center of the room. “There she is, the little cutie,” he mocked Judy. Snatching her last night couldn’t have been easier. She’d been stumbling toward the edge of the woods beyond the cookout, drunk out of her gourd. “Why, sure, Judy,″ he’d answered her blabbering request. ”I’d be more’n happy to drive you back to the house.” He’d driven her back to the shanty instead, handcuffed and with her D-cup bra stuffed in her mouth. Drunken bitch didn’t even know what he was doing, she was so stewed. Now she lay on the floor, on her side, tied up like a trussed goose. One ample breast had fallen out of the torn blouse, the nipple large as a beer coaster. Trey, of course, did the gentlemanly thing, saying, ”Ah, now, that ain’t right. A gal can’t be havin’ a tit hangin’ out.” And then he ripped back the blouse some more. ”She needs both hangin’ out. There, that’s better.” He gave them both a good feel. Trey had plans for these breasts, and for everything else connected to them . . . but not just yet. He’d be setting her up for another psycho job; this one would look like some of the clan did it, the ones who were running meth. Only Trey knew that there were actually no Squatters selling anything except fucking crabs—but that was beside the point.

  “You first, buddy-bro.” Trey grabbed Ernie by the back of the belt and dragged him to the car. He mewled beneath his gag, eyes blooming with rage. Trey hocked on him once he got the cracker loaded into the truck. “Time for a road trip,” the dutiful officer promised, then slammed the trunk closed.

  Trey cleared his head as he drove, smiling to himself. The moon was just up over the trees, gibbous, yellow as a grapefruit. Even closet sociopaths like Trey found their moments of existential harmony. I’m gonna kill a couple more people tonight, and you know what? I dig it. All part of the plan. He particularly liked the notion that on the same day he’d unofficially become Agan’s Point’s new police chief, he’d disposed of two bodies and was about to dispose of two more.

  I’m really gettin’ the hang of this, he thought.

  The spur he was looking for sat about five miles north of the Point, inaccessible to boats—due to rocks and a low-tide margin—and well hidden by a wall of trees. When Trey was a boy, in fact, he’d come down here on his own to drop chicken necks. The crabs were humongous and so plentiful he could pull a half bushel in an hour. More of that same existential harmony seized him now when he parked and opened the trunk. Cicadas trilled, the moonlight bathed his face, and the lapping water along the shore made him truly feel one with the universe, the master of his own destiny.

  “Out’cha go,” he said, hefting Ernie out of the trunk and carrying him like a heavy suitcase by the back of his belt. In the other hand, Trey carried his crowbar.

  “Ain’t no one to hear ya way out here,” Trey said, and cut off his gag.

  “You fuckin’ piece a’ shit, Trey,” Ernie wheezed, crooking his neck to look up. “I always knowed you were a twisted motherfucker.”

  “I did fuck my mother, Ernie. Lotsa times. And I’m damn proud of it. Now let’s get you fixed up. Hot night like this, you need a cool dip.” Trey shoved Ernie on his side, raised the crowbar high, and—

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  —hammered the crowbar’s elbow hard between Ernie’s shoulder blades. Ernie grunted a salvo of less-than-eloquent objections, then began to shudder. Several more cracks between the shoulder blades sufficed to achieve Trey’s purpose. He leaned over and cut the hogtie, watched Ernie’s limbs slump.

  “Are ya dead?” Trey asked, slamming his shoe down on Ernie’s hand. There was no recoil, no movement whatsoever. But Ernie’s eyes were still blinking, his chest rising, and his throat gulping.

  “I-I cain’t move,” Ernie choked. “Cain’t move my arms or legs, ya motherfuckin’ sick piece a’ shit . . .”

  “That’s ’cos I just paralyzed ya, dickhead.” Trey nodded a secret approval, like an acknowledgment shared exclusively between himself and the night. He’d fractured the spine high enough to cause total paralysis but not quite high enough to kill. “You always were a noballs, do-good hayseed, Ernie. Well, now you’re a quadriplegic no-balls, do-good hayseed.”

  Ernie drooled, only his head moving. “You’ll burn in hell, so I guess that’s good enough.”

  “Sure, but you’ll get there first. And when you’re down there suckin’ the devil’s dick, I’ll still be here, havin’ a ball.” Trey chuckled as he took to his next task. He tore open Ernie’s shirt, pulled off his boots, then yanked his jeans down to his knees.

  “What are you, queer?” Ernie challenged. “I figured ya for a lotta things, but not that.”

  Trey guffawed. “Don’t worry, Ernie-boy. I ain’t gonna pack your fudge. I done told ya—you’re goin’ fer a nice cool dip in the good ol’ Chesapeake Bay.” And then Trey dragged Ernie into the shallow water until the water came over his chest.

  “All you’re gonna do is drown me?” Ernie managed. It could be discerned by the straining expression on his face that he was trying to move his limbs, but those nerves were no longer firing at all. “Figured a sick fuck like you’d cut me up or hang me or somethin’.”

  ″Naw, Ernie, this is much better, and no, I ain’t gonna drown ya neither.” Now Trey leaned Ernie’s head up against a rotten log in the water. He couldn’t move, and was braced enough so that there was no way he might sidle over into the water and indeed drown.

  A moment passed; then Ernie figured it out, to his extreme misfortune. “Aw, no, God . . .”

  Trey grinned down at his work: Ernie’s head and shoulders were propped out of the water, but the rest of his body was submerged.

  “Agan’s Point crabs’ll eat good tonight,” Trey said, then walked back to the car and drove off.

  Fifteen

  (I)

  “It’s all beyond belief,” Byron said in a very low voice over the phone.

  Patricia was looking blankly out the window as she talked, her cell phone to her ear. “I know,” she said. “I feel useless. I don’t know what to do. I came out here to help my sister, but now I don’t even know where she is.”

  “Well, enough is enough. You have to come home now.”

  She chewed her lower lip. She did want to go home now, but how could she? “Byron, Judy is missing. I can’t leave until I know she’s safe.”

  Byron’s dissatisfaction could be sensed over the line. “At this point, I don’t even care. All I care about is you being back here with me. I want you here now, in our house—safe. I don’t care about Judy, I don’t care about those nutty Squatter people, I don’t care about docks and lean-tos burning down. People are getting murdered there, Patricia. So you get in your car—right now—and drive home. Now. This minute.”

  It was rare for Byron to be this bent out of shape; he was even mad, something rarer. “I want to come home, too, Byron. But I can’t leave until I know Judy’s all right—”

  “She probably passed out drunk in the woods!” Byron exploded. “Whoever’s doing these burnings—these drug people—they could burn Judy’s house down next, with you in it!”

  “Honey, calm down,” she tried to pacify him. The sun from the window glared in her eyes. He was right, and by now . . .

  By now, I’m sick to death of Agan’s Point and hope I never see the place again. “I’ll be home soon. . . .”

  “Damn it! You’re so fucking stubborn!”

  I know I am. But I can’t leave yet. “I’ll be home in three days, no more. I promise.”

  “What if you can’t find her by then? What if she’s dead? I’m sorry if that sounds insensitive, but I don’t give a shit about your sister compared to you!”

  Patricia sighed. “I’m sure she’ll turn up by then.”

  “But what if she doesn’t?” Byron blared.

  “Then I’ll come home a
nyway. I’ll come home Sunday no matter what.”

  Now Byron sighed, too. “I just miss you so much, and I love you. I want you home, away from that crazy place.”

  “I’ll be home, honey. On Sunday.”

  He calmed down in a moment, and they said their good-byes for the moment, Patricia promising to call him several times a day until she left. Indulging me is wearing him out, she realized. I’m not being much of a wife, am I? She remembered her failed antics with Ernie, her drunkenness, and her complete disregard toward Byron since she’d been here. Yeah, I’ve been a really lousy wife lately. About the only thing she could look forward to was making it up to him.

  Did she hear sirens in the distance? She wasn’t sure. Don’t tell me something else was set on fire. . . . She called the town police station, inquiring, “Has Judy Parker been located yet?”

  “No, ma’am,” a woman replied quickly.

  “What about Ernie Gooder?”

  The receptionist seemed hurried. “He hasn’t been found yet either, and neither has Chief Sutter.”

  “Is Sergeant Trey available now?”

  An exasperated sigh. “No, ma’am. He’s out helping the state police look.”

  “Well, if anybody turns up, could you please call—”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I have a radio call. I have to go. Call back at five or six. Sergeant Trey should be back by then. Have a good day.”

  Click.

  The little bit of radio squawk Patricia had heard in the background sounded urgent. Maybe those really were sirens I heard. . . .

  She showered and dressed, feeling awkward, even uneasy. I’m the only one here, she reminded herself. Last night she’d slept fitfully, the only one in the house then, as well. But she’d been sure to wear her nightgown this time, and close and lock the window and her bedroom door. She’d refused to admit to herself that she was afraid.

  The beautiful morning outside should’ve heartened her, but it didn’t. What’s happening here? she thought, driving through some of the town’s side roads. Modest homes from sparse yards looked back at her. Yes, the town appeared normal, quaint, and very sane. But this past week assured her of the falsehood of appearances. Who knows what’s going on behind some of those doors? she thought.

  She took the Cadillac off the Point, vaguely heading in the direction from which she thought she’d heard sirens. An ambiguous nausea flirted with her stomach, and it took her a few moments to realize why: this was roughly the same direction as Bowen’s Field. . . .

  Forget about it. You’re long over all that.

  And she did feel long over the incident, just as Dr. Sallee had explained. And miles before the road would lead to Bowen’s Field, she saw a state police car turning down a trail into the woods.

  Something is going on out here, she realized.

  The road wound down to a rutted dirt lane. Around the bend, she stopped short, startled. My God! What happened here? An ambulance and three police cars sat parked with their lights flashing. Sergeant Shannon, the rugged state trooper she’d talked to yesterday, stood with the other officers, arms crossed and looking down toward a fingerlike estuary cutting into the woods from the bay. Shannon turned at the sound of her tires, then broke from the others and approached.

  “Ms. White,” he said, holding up a cautious hand, “you don’t want to come down here.”

  “What happened!” she blurted, heart racing. She spotted two EMTs dragging a gurney from the ambulance. One of them also unfolded a black body bag. “It’s not my sister, is it?”

  The trooper blocked her way. He looked a little pale. “No, it’s not. It’s one of the other missing persons—Ernie Gooder. I’m afraid he’s d—”

  Patricia pushed past him, wild-eyed. No! It can’t be! But even as the plea left her lips, she knew the worst.

  Her eyes shot down at the water. She blinked. Then she jerked her gaze away.

  “I told you you didn’t want to come down here, Ms. White,” Shannon said. “There is some rough stuff going on in this town.”

  Rough stuff. What Patricia had seen in the several seconds she’d actually been able to look was this: Ernie’s dead body being dragged out of the shallow water . . . or, it could be said, something significantly less than his dead body.

  From the chest down the body looked corroded, or even eaten. All the skin and quite a bit of muscle mass was absent, leaving raw white bones showing. The waist down was the worst—there was essentially nothing left but tendons and scraps of muscle fiber along the leg bones and hips: a wet skeleton. Skeletal feet pointed up at the ends of the lower leg bones. Ernie’s sodden shirt had been torn open and hung off the shoulders, while his pants looked congealed at what was left of his ankles. Some arcane process had whittled away the flesh, leaving this human scrap, and in the final second of her glimpse, Patricia realized what that process was.

  At least a dozen very large blue crabs let go of those skeletal legs when the body had been pulled out, whereupon they skittered back into the water. Ernie had been used for crab bait.

  Patricia wanted to throw up. She felt dizzy at once, and braced herself against a tree. “My God,” she wheezed.

  “Sorry you had to see that,” Shannon said. “These drug wars can get down and dirty.”

  “Iknew him very well,” Patricia mumbled over the nausea. “He simply wasn’t the type to sell or use drugs.”

  Shannon seemed convinced otherwise. “We found crystal meth in his room, so how do you explain—”

  “Sergeant Shannon?” one of the EMTs called out. He knelt at Ernie’s horrific corpse, as gloved cops prepared to slide it into the body bag. “Found some CDS in his pants pocket. Looks like crystal meth. You’ll want to bag it as evidence.”

  “You were saying?” Shannon said back to Patricia.

  When she heard the bag being zipped up, some morbid force caused her to steal one last glance. Ernie was now mostly in the bag, but his head hung out, neck craned back. That was when she saw . . .

  His teeth . . . My God, his teeth . . .

  “You all right, Ms. White?”

  “His two front teeth are missing,” she croaked. “It’s impossible for me to not have noticed that in the past.”

  “Ever hear of false teeth? They probably fell out when his attackers were putting him in the water.”

  Patricia didn’t hear whatever else he said before he departed and went to secure the drug evidence.

  His two front teeth are missing. The words droned in her head. It was the one thing she’d never forget: the man who’d raped her over twenty-five years ago had been missing his two front teeth. . . .

  Patricia could barely maintain her composure. She stood up at the end of the road with Shannon. They both watched in silence as the ambulance and other police cars drove away, leaving a veil of road dust hanging in the air. When the last vehicle had left, Patricia stood in numb shock, the cicada sounds beating in her ears.

  “I can tell you,” Shannon began, “nothing will ruin a town and its people faster than dope. It’s happening everywhere. And half the time it’s the people you least expect.”

  “It’s just . . . Ernie,” she said. “He wasn’t the type at all.”

  “All it takes is one hit off a meth pipe and you’re done. Every addict I ever busted says the same thing. It changes you overnight. And once the stuff tips you over, you’re making it or selling it just to maintain your own supply. It turns decent people into thieves, killers, criminals—human animals. And good luck making it through rehab. This stuff and crack? The success rate is so low it’s not even worth bothering with. You can put a meth-head in prison for ten years, and he’s back with the pipe the first day he gets out. That’s how addictive this stuff is.”

  Patricia shook her head, looking out into the woods.

  “So you knew this guy pretty well, I take it,” the trooper observed.

  “I thought I did. I grew up with him as a kid. I live in D.C. now, but I came back to Agan’s Point for a visit—the
first time in years.”

  “Well, now you can see what happened to him over those years.”

  “I guess I knew something was wrong—I couldn’t imagine he’d gotten involved with drug people. He wasn’t the type.”

  “There isn’t a type. It can happen to anyone. You experiment with something like this, think, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it once to see what it’s like.’ Then you’re never the same. We’re pretty sure Ernie Gooder was the person who burned down the docks two nights ago.”

  “What time did you say the fire occurred?”

  ″Three thirty.”

  Patricia smirked. “He was peeping in my window around quarter after.”

  “Really?” Shannon said. “You’re lucky that all he did was peep. Anyway, it’s obvious what’s going on out here—a meth war between two gangs. Ernie and some of these other locals are in one gang, and a bunch of these Squatters are in the other. And now they’re duking it out. It might seem impossible for a place like this, but like I said, the same thing’s happening all over the state.” Shannon shrugged. “Chief Sutter being missing doesn’t look good either.”

  “So you think he’s involved with drugs?”

  ″A cop, especially a police chief, is the kind of power person any dope gang will pay to work for them and protect their runs. You wouldn’t believe the kind of money a crooked cop can make.”

  “Is that what you really think? That Chief Sutter is working with a drug gang?”

  “It’s either that or he got killed trying to make a bust. A police chief doesn’t just disappear.″

  Even in her civilian naïveté, Patricia was coming to grips with Sergeant Shannon’s suspicions.

  The heat was steepening, the humidity drawing beads of sweat on her brow.

  “And I’m sorry I’m the one to tell you this, but I’m sure you’ve already considered it anyway,” Shannon told her. “There’s a pretty big chance that your sister was involved in some of this too. She’s also missing. There’s a good chance—″