by Ken Oder
“A week or so before Christmas. He showed up about noon on a cold day when I was workin on the baseboard heaters, tryin to get more heat in here for the dogs.”
“You’d never met him before?”
“I seen him at Bootsie’s Store a couple times. He lives up a road here a ways.”
“Did he say why he wanted to buy the drugs?”
“He said he heard I put down dogs for people. Said he had two German shepherds. Raised em up from pups. Fourteen years old. They come down with cancer about the same time. One had a tumor wrapped around his spine. The other’n had cancer in his belly. Said they couldn’t walk. Couldn’t eat. Fished out two hunnerd-dollar bills. Said he needed to buy the drugs so he could put em down.”
“And you sold the drugs to him?”
“Not at first. I told him I wasn’t allowed to sell em. Asked him to bring his dogs in. Said I’d put em down at no charge. But he said he couldn’t do it that way. Said he owed it to his dogs to be the one who put em down. He begged me. I felt bad for him. So I gave him the drugs. He stuffed the two hunnerds in my shirt pocket and took the drugs on off with him.”
“How much succinylcholine did you give him?”
“He said both dogs was well over a hunnerd pounds. Said he wanted three bottles of each drug cause he didn’t want to come up short, botch up the put-downs, and make his dogs suffer more. It was way more’n he needed, but he was real worried about makin sure it would do the job, so I didn’t fight him on it.”
“You know where the man lives?”
“He rents the old Jolley place up on Bald Eagle.”
Deford asked for directions, then hurried out to his patrol car and drove off.
Percy was relieved. Most lawmen would have busted him for selling the drugs. This Deford seemed a more decent sort. Hell, on his way out, he went so far as to thank Percy for his help. Even Rollo would have to admit that was mighty white of him.
Percy turned back to Henry. He nailed the lid on the coffin, retrieved a big smooth river rock from Momma’s flower bed, and carried it and the pine box out to his old yellow GMC pickup, where he put them in the truck bed beside the shovel.
He got in his truck and started the climb up to the plot of land he had chosen for his dog cemetery on top of Bald Eagle, a pretty spot under a big oak tree with a view of the hollow. He had placed a big smooth river rock over each of seven graves under the old oak. Henry would be number eight.
The sunset colored the clouds butterscotch, strawberry, and peach. Half-dead honeysuckle vines clung to falling-down barbed wire fencing along both sides of the road. Halfway up Bald Eagle a hawk floated on the wind, hunting prey in the neglected pasture of an abandoned farm. Twilight brought a cold breeze in the truck window. Percy rolled it up and twisted the dial on the heater. It kicked in with its usual racket, sounding like BBs banging around inside a tin can, and the cab slowly warmed up.
When he rounded the turn to the old Jolley place near the summit, he came up on a patrol car parked behind an olive-green county truck. He slowed down and stopped. Deputy Karson Deford was down on one knee beside the truck, holding a man’s bloody hand. The rest of the man seemed to be under the truck.
Percy parked in the Jolley driveway and shuffled across the road as Deford pulled the man out from under the truck. Percy recognized him: Dooley, the foster boy who made good. He was in a bad way. A huge blood stain smeared with grit covered the front of his shirt. His body was limp; his eyes closed. Deford put his hand to Dooley’s throat.
Percy stood over them, gawking.
Deford pressed his hand against Dooley’s chest up near the shoulder. “Kneel down here,” he said.
Percy knelt beside Dooley.
“Put your hand where mine is. Press down on the wound.”
Percy didn’t move, his mouth hanging open.
Deford took his hand and pressed it flat against Dooley’s chest. The slick warmth of blood repelled Percy. He tried to pull his hand away, but Deford forced it over the wound. “Press hard right there.” Percy made himself do it. The metallic scent, like the butchering room in Bootsie’s Store, almost made him gag.
“Don’t let up on the pressure. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Wait! Don’t leave me!”
Deford ran to his car and talked to someone on his radio. Only a minute passed, but it seemed like an hour before he returned to Percy’s side. He ripped open a plastic wrapper and withdrew a big wad of red cloth.
“What’s that?”
“Carlisle bandage. Keep pressing down on the wound.”
“I never seen a bandage like that. Where’d you get it?”
“Korea.”
Deford unraveled the ball of red cloth. In its center was a heavily gauzed cream-colored patch an inch thick. “Hold him up while I wrap this around him.”
Percy lifted Dooley’s head and torso off the ground. Deford placed the thick gauzed part of the bandage over the wound, unspooled the lengths of red cloth from both sides of the gauze, wound them twice around Dooley’s back and chest, and tied them at his back, pulling hard on the ends to cinch it tightly.
“Stretch him out on the ground.”
Percy eased Dooley down on his back.
Deford took off his jacket. “Take off your coat,” he said.
Percy took off his coat.
Deford rolled his jacket and Percy’s coat together, placed them under Dooley’s feet, and ran back to his patrol car.
Percy stared at the blood on his hands and arms and on his shirt and pants. When Deford returned with a blanket, Percy saw that he was covered with blood, too. There was blood all over Dooley, and blood had sunk into the dust where Deford pulled him out from under the truck. Percy never would have believed a man’s body contained as much blood as Dooley had lost. He couldn’t imagine there was much left inside him. “He’s going to die,” Percy said.
Deford spread the blanket over Dooley and tucked it in at his sides and around his neck. He placed his hand on Dooley’s throat. “He’s not dead yet.” Deford looked down the road. “Time’s running out, though.” He swiped sweat from his forehead, smearing blood on his face.
Percy looked at the fancy bandage. “All of you have them?”
“What?”
“That Carlisle bandage. All the county officers carry them?”
Deford shook his head. “I brought a few back from Korea after the war. Keep them in the trunk of my car. Thought they might come in handy for gunshot wounds.”
“Looks like you thought right.”
Deford put his hand to Dooley’s throat again. “Don’t die on me, son.” He checked the bandage and then looked down the road. “Come on,” he said under his breath.
“Who did this to him?” Percy asked.
“You know what kind of vehicle Middleditch drives?”
“Black Dodge pickup.”
“A black pickup tore past me when I pulled out of your driveway. I almost went after him. Thank God I didn’t.”
Percy was stunned. “Middleditch seemed like a nice feller. Loved his dogs. Wanted them to go out the right way.”
“My guess is Middleditch doesn’t own a dog.”
The truth gradually dawned on Percy. “I’ll be damned.”
Percy looked at Dooley. His chest rose and fell under the blanket. He was alive, if only barely.
Deford checked the bandage again. Percy studied the man. Cool. Professional. Smart. Doing his job right. If Dooley survived, Deford would be the reason.
Percy resolved to have a sit-down with Rollo. Set him straight about Deford. Tell him to shut down the trash talk. Or else he could find a new friend. Do his own goddamn put-downs.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Sanctuary
March 9, 1967, Thursday afternoon and night
Ray ran the stop sign at Horsehead Road and sped through Tinker’s Mill, pounding the steering wheel with his fist and cursing. The speedometer crested eighty on the narrow straightaways out of Tinker’s Mil
l, tires squealing on the turns. Halfway to Whippoorwill Hollow Road, he hit the brakes hard to turn onto a dirt road, slid into a ditch, and stalled out.
He turned the ignition key. The starter grinded. He pumped the accelerator, looking up and down the road. No one coming along, thank God, but he had to get out of sight. The starter coughed but wouldn’t catch. “God damn you!”
The engine finally kicked over and sputtered. He floored the accelerator, holding the clutch down. Black smoke billowed from the exhaust pipe. The engine smoothed out and roared. He shifted into low gear and eased off the clutch. The rear wheels spun in the soft loam of the ditch, then gained traction and climbed out of the trough into a plowed field. He drove across it to the dirt road and sped along to the tree line of a poplar forest. He stopped a hundred feet inside the woods where the truck couldn’t be seen from Horsehead Road.
He took deep breaths. The engine idled, the cab vibrating. The forest canopy arched over the dirt road, killing off the last remnants of daylight. He rolled down the window and a cold wind blew inside, bracing him.
Calm down, he told himself. You’re all right. Dooley tracked down Ray Middleditch and found the house. That’s all he knows. You expected as much. You planned for it. Take it in stride and move on.
He looked at the dark road ahead.
“Follow the plan,” he said aloud.
He eased the truck forward. A quarter mile farther along, he emerged from the tree tunnel into the dying light. Blood of the Lamb Church stood in a little clearing, the cross atop its tall, narrow steeple catching a last ray of sunlight. He drove around to the rear of the building, parked at the back stoop, and tried the door. It was locked. He found the key in the same hiding place his father had used a half century ago, under a big rock beside a downspout at the corner of the building. He was glad. He would have hated to violate the old place by breaking in.
He unlocked the door and stepped into the little anteroom. It hadn’t changed much, cream-colored beadboard walls and ceiling, dark-stained oak floors, the desk and cane chair along the wall, the daybed under the window now covered with a maize bedspread instead of the pale blue one he remembered. His father had set up the room to study and prepare his sermons. He had added the daybed to accommodate all-night sessions when the Holy Ghost would wring all the strength from his body and soul as he divined the Word of God. On those nights, his father would collapse on the bed in blissful exhaustion, sometimes sleeping straight through the next day. The preachers who succeeded Ray’s father at Blood of the Lamb treasured the solitude and spiritual communion with God the little anteroom afforded them, and they had maintained it up to the present day.
Ray crossed the room to the door that entered the sanctuary from behind the pulpit, opened it, and stepped inside. Red carpet still covered the floor around the altar and ran up the aisles between the fifteen rows of pine pews that were striped with rainbow colors from the fading sunlight penetrating the stained glass windows.
He climbed the steps to the raised pulpit where his father had stood on Sunday mornings in 1915. He looked down at the offering table from which his father had dispensed communion, the altar where the sinners had knelt to be saved, and the front pew where he and his mother had sat dressed in their Sunday best.
The church was strong in his father’s day, but the congregation dwindled after he moved on, its youth abandoning the faith, its aging faithful dying off. Now only a dozen survivors remained, all seventy or older. Ray had heard the bishop had given up on them. He had tacked Blood of the Lamb onto the Feather Mountain Circuit as the fourth and smallest church of Reverend Chatham’s charge, its schedule of worship services squeezed out by the demands of the other congregations. Blood of the Lamb’s parishioners only assembled on the second and fourth Sunday nights of the month now, and no one visited the church during the week. Sad for the church, but perfect for Ray’s purposes.
He took a last look at the sanctuary and went back into the anteroom.
Luckily, just before Dooley showed up, he’d loaded the truck with almost everything he needed in preparation for leaving the county in a few days. He retrieved Bowie’s .30-06, his Colt Python, and the drugs and bandages from the truck and carried them into the anteroom. When he’d set up everything the way he wanted, he sat down on the daybed with the Cutty Sark.
He took a swig, wincing as it burned its way down, and thought about his next move. The safest alternative was to cut and run, leaving Reba and Ballard, if he survived, alive, but if he did that, Boss wouldn’t pay him the second thirty thousand.
Ray took another big swallow and set the bottle on the floor. He stretched out on the bed and draped his forearm over his brow. Staring at the beadboard ceiling, he weighed the risk of sticking it out to finish the job.
The law would be scouring the county tonight, but no one would think to look for him here. He would need to lay low, and now that the law knew what the truck looked like, he couldn’t risk driving around in daylight tomorrow, but he still had time to finish the project. Sunday, when the church members would show up, was three days away. He could go after Reba tomorrow night and pay a visit to Ballard at the hospital the night after that.
Then he would run. He’d be across the state line by dawn on Sunday; in Cheraw by nightfall. He’d collect his thirty thousand from Boss and take a few months off. Buy a woman. Take her to the Outer Banks or one of the islands off the Carolina coast, someplace where he could lay out in the sun and drink whiskey. When he’d healed up to full strength, he’d go back to Cheraw, change his identity again, and return to Selk County to settle the score with Cole.
He sat up, lifted the bottle, and turned it up. Smooth as silk, like always. He swiped his hand across his mouth, got the ice sleeve out of the cooler, hitched up his pants, and wrapped it around his swollen knee.
He took the gauze bandage off his arm. The swelling had gone down. Ugly brown and purple stripes ran from his wrist to his elbow, but the lacerations looked clean and scabbed over. No pus. No brown blood. He poured disinfectant over the wound, gritting his teeth at the sting. He got a clean needle and gave himself another shot of morphine, his second since he’d vowed to cut himself off. “That’s it,” he muttered. “Last one.” He wrapped his arm in clean gauze and tied it off.
He washed down two arthritis pills with whiskey, took a last big swallow, and stretched out on the bed. His eyes shifted up to the bed’s bronze trellis. It looked the same as that first night he had found a different use for the bed than resting up after wrestling with the Lord’s angels, a use his father never would have approved.
“Ain’t you scared?” Franny Compton had whispered in his ear as he grinded away at her. “What if somebody catches us? What if your daddy walks in on us, nekkid as the day we was born, goin at it like a couple stray cats?”
“It’s past midnight, Franny. No one ever comes to the church this late.”
She bent her knees and tightened her legs around his waist. “You oughta know, I reckon, you bein the preacher’s son and all.”
“Trust me. I know.” He arched his back, and his eyes fell on the bronze trellis just as he pushed inside her.
He smiled, remembering that night, the first of many late nights with different girls on the daybed. In his mind’s eye, he ticked through them one after another in chronological succession until he came to the last. Not a girl, but a woman, and he not a teenage boy, but a man. His smile faded. He knew then he shouldn’t have started down that track.
He sat up, put his palms over his eyes, and tried hard to extinguish her memory, but she wouldn’t leave him. He grabbed the Cutty Sark and gulped down a quarter of the bottle. He leaned forward, gagging. When the nausea passed, he lifted the bottle again, guzzled too much too fast, gagged again, recovered, and repeated the cycle. When the bottle was empty, he dropped it on the floor and fell back on the bed. Her image receded into mist. His mind numbed. Night fell like a heavy curtain over his eyes.
He dreamed of a dark swamp with a t
hick fog hovering over its brackish waters. A huge serpent slithered through the mud at the shoreline. Cole Grundy stepped out of the miasma, his gun drawn. He pointed the gun at the serpent. The serpent coiled to strike. Cole fired just as the serpent lunged at him.
Ray lurched out of sleep, sat up on the edge of the daybed, and rubbed his eyes. Moonlight coming in the window fell across his bandaged arm. He stroked the gauze and thought about Cole. Killing him next fall would be the final act in the long drama between them. He would plan the hit carefully. Lie in wait at his house. Step out of the shadows. A close-in shot to the chest before he had a chance to draw his gun. A kill shot to the head while he was down.
Ray ran a trembling hand across his lips. Cole would be his last hit. He would be done then. There would be no reason to go on after that.
He looked at the vial of morphine sitting on the desk. He got out of bed and walked over to it.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Fingerprint
March 10, 1967, Friday morning
The next morning, Cole drove through downtown Jeetersburg on his way from Dolley Madison Hospital to headquarters. When he turned off Lee Street onto Lighthorse, he pulled to the curb beside the town square. A statue of a Confederate infantryman stood on one side of the square; General Robert E. Lee on the other. In between, neatly trimmed boxwoods bordered triangular wedges of mowed lawn. Pea-stone paths ran from the sidewalks into the square and encircled a fountain, a three-tiered stack of copper urns. Morning sunlight sifted through the shade trees to dapple a park bench that faced it.
Cole saw Carrie sitting on the bench on a pretty summer day as he walked over the pathway toward her. She looked up at him with a pixie grin, the sun streaking her red hair with golden highlights. He sat down beside her.
She wore a short, blousy dress with big red roses on a white background. Her legs were tan and freckled. He put his hand on her knee. She took his hand in both of hers, still grinning. “This is a treat, meeting you for lunch.”