The Dirty South - Charlie Parker Series 18 (2020)

by Connolly, John

‘I warned him he’d come to a bad end.’

  ‘I’m sure that was a solace to him as he walked into God’s light.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Tilon Ward was in the vicinity at some point. He left his wallet in one of the RVs, which means he departed in a hurry, most likely when the shooting started. As for Hollis Ward, he was never there.’

  ‘Because he’s dead,’ said Parker.

  ‘He left his mark on Donna Lee’s body.’

  ‘I think someone did, but not him.’

  ‘I have to confess that I struggle to follow your line of reasoning. I’m heading back to town, and Kel has returned from Little Rock. If you could see your way clear to joining us at the station, I thought we might have a conference to establish where we’re at. You could take it as an opportunity to clarify your thought processes for us.’

  ‘Then I’ll probably see you there.’

  ‘That word “probably” troubles me,’ said Griffin, but the only response he received was dead air, because Parker had already killed the call and was dialing the number for the state crime lab. He got through to the switchboard and asked for Ruth Temple. He was advised to hold the line, and five minutes went by before Temple eventually picked up.

  ‘We have bodies on the way,’ she said. ‘Human bodies.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘From Burdon County.’

  ‘I know that, too.’

  ‘Are you responsible for any of them?’

  ‘No, but the word is that one of them will have a bear trap attached. Just warning you.’

  ‘I hope to meet you someday,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. I examined your possum.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I can’t say with certainty that its injuries resulted from the same blade that was used on Donna Lee Kernigan.’

  Parker picked up on the inflection in her speech.

  ‘But?’

  ‘The dimensions are similar, and so is the depth of the wounds.’

  ‘So it could be the same blade?’

  ‘It could be, yes.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ She paused. ‘I hope it helps.’

  ‘It hasn’t hindered,’ said Parker. ‘Right now, I’ll settle for that much.’

  He said goodbye and walked to the driver’s side of the Mustang. Louis let the window down.

  ‘Cresil’s dead.’

  ‘With Butcher and Dix also dead,’ said Louis, ‘looks like your back is safe.’

  ‘Do you want to leave?’ said Parker.

  ‘Do you want us to leave?’

  Parker looked north, toward Cargill. Sometimes, he thought, you operated on evidence, and sometimes on instinct. Mostly, it was a combination of both.

  ‘I may need a lock picked,’ he said.

  Beside Louis, Angel visibly brightened. Angel had no great fondness for anywhere farther south of Manhattan than Tottenville. The fact that he was present at all spoke volumes about his loyalty to Parker.

  ‘More than one?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘You never know,’ said Parker, turning toward his car. ‘And if you’re very good, I may even let you steal something.’

  95

  The rain had cleared, but thin, persistent clouds hung like gauze over the sky, soaking up all the warmth so that only a vestige reached the earth. The sun was a coral orb, bleeding burnt orange and carmine crimson into a lacteal sea. Upright crows stood like thorns upon the topmost branches of the trees, and the air smelled of rot and standing water. Parker felt an ache in his fingers and toes as he drove, and a sense of deep, unanchored regret that caused his throat to seize up and his eyes to sting. He knew now that the dead spoke with one voice, and the final agony was the same for all.

  A memory came to him of a walk in Prospect Park with Jennifer, only a month before she died. They had found a small form lying curled upon the grass: a squirrel, puncture marks on its neck.

  ‘What happened to it?’ said Jennifer.

  ‘I think a dog might have caught it.’

  ‘It’s so little.’ Jennifer’s voice was full of pity, wonder, and sadness. Her hand tightened on his. ‘Do we have to leave it out here all alone?’

  ‘No. We can bury it if you like.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He lifted the animal in his hands. It was still warm. Its head hung loosely over his palms, and his fingers found the break in its neck. Yet what struck him most forcefully was how heavy it was, how dense with mortality. Life had lent it grace, but death had restored its substantiality. Even after they placed the squirrel in the ground and covered it with dirt, he could feel the memory of its mass, the burden of its absence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he was speaking not to one dead girl but to four dead children. He thought that were he to pull over and descend into the woods, he would discover them waiting, paused in the act of shadowing: three young black women, and with them a fourth – a white child, wandering. He saw darkness curl into a tunnel of smoke, and a light shining like a vermilion wound at the heart of the world. Moisture touched his cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and it came away bloody. He looked in the rearview mirror. A line of red trickled from his scalp and dripped onto his face. He had no recollection of injuring himself. He pushed back his hair to reveal the source, but could not locate it. There was only blood, except that he could no longer say with any certainty that it was his own.

  96

  The two cars pulled up in front of the abandoned gas station, and the stained, pitted screen of the drive-in theater came briefly alive with the shadows of passing clouds, like the remembrance of some old movie retained in the aluminum panels.

  ‘Why this place?’ said Angel, as he and Louis joined Parker in the forecourt.

  ‘Because someone took a blade to a possum here,’ said Parker. He had cleaned the blood from his face with the sleeve of his jacket and now could no longer detect the stain on the material. It was as though it had never been.

  From somewhere in the untidy depths of his clothing, Angel produced a zippered leather pouch, which he opened to reveal an old but well-tended set of picks, torsion wrenches, and skeleton keys. Angel rarely traveled without the tools of his former – and, Parker suspected, periodically current – trade. He walked to the garage building and began testing each padlock with a pick, although without trying to open any of them. To Parker’s eye, all the locks looked old and rusted, but he said nothing and left Angel to finish his work.

  ‘The lock on the side door is in use, and so is the one on the main garage entrance on the left,’ said Angel, when he was done, ‘but the side door more than the other. The rest haven’t been opened in a long time.’

  ‘Can you get me in?’

  ‘Which door would you prefer?’

  ‘Side.’

  ‘Done.’

  It took about ten seconds. The smell hit Parker as soon as Angel opened the door: putrefaction, and something older resembling the mustiness of a tomb. Parker took his gloves from his pocket and pulled them on. He reached inside the doorway and located the light switch. Only one of the fluorescents flickered to life, but it was enough for him to see what lay within: a Toyota Tercel with Arkansas plates, a human shape behind the wheel; and a body cocooned in plastic in a corner, its outline distorted by what appeared to be spikes beneath the covering.

  Louis unfolded a clean white handkerchief and offered it to Parker. It smelled of expensive male scent – not sufficiently to mask entirely the stench from the garage, but enough to take the edge away.

  ‘Get the cars out of sight,’ he told Louis.

  The road was quiet, and the property didn’t appear to be overlooked, but Parker didn’t want whoever was responsible for maintaining this place to be alerted should they happen to chance by. He held the handkerchief to his nose and stepped into the garage. He went first to the car and opened the passenger door. The body in the driver’s seat was heavily swollen, and
the bugs had begun to colonize it, but he could still tell that he was looking at a dead black woman, her mouth forming an oval around the branch that had been jammed down her throat. There was dried blood around her nose and chin, but he could see no other signs of injury. The make and license number matched that of Sallie Kernigan’s vehicle.

  Parker did not touch the body, but gently closed the door before moving on to the plastic-wrapped remains. They were much older, and almost skeletonized, but Parker could tell they were male. Sharp sticks had been driven deeply into the legs, arms, and torso, held in place by the plastic even as decomposition had gradually excised the flesh. A larger stake protruded from the damaged jaws, and another appeared to have been inserted deep into the victim’s rectum. Two fingers were missing from the right hand, but the damage seemed old. On a shelf nearby, Parker saw a jar of yellowing preservative. Lying at the bottom were the amputated digits. If Parker was correct, he was looking at what was left of Hollis Ward.

  He made a cursory search of the rest of the garage, but found nothing more than old pornographic calendars, rusting equipment, and disintegrating tires. He went back outside, removed the handkerchief from his face, and breathed deeply of the fresh air, although the smell of the woman’s rot now clung to him. He took out his cell phone and found the number for Eddy Rauls. The former chief investigator picked up on the second ring, as though he spent his days sitting by the phone, perhaps waiting for this very call.

  ‘Mr Rauls? It’s Charlie Parker.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘What do you know about the abandoned gas station at the end of your road?’

  ‘Hollis Ward’s old place? I don’t pay much attention to it. It’s a Cade property now.’

  ‘Who looks after it for them?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s much looked after at all. It’s just waiting for the wrecking ball. But the son comes by now and again to check the locks. He told me once that Pappy threw him a few bucks a month to keep an eye on unoccupied premises and make sure kids couldn’t break in and start a fire.’

  ‘Which son?’

  ‘The younger one, Nealus. Said it gave him a sense of purpose …’

  97

  Nealus Cade drew closer to Cargill. He wasn’t driving the Nissan, or even the beat-up Dodge, but an Acura with a cloned plate, bought for cash from a junkyard in Linden, Texas, and stored in the garage of one of the properties he tended for the family. From the trunk of the car came a faint thudding, as of feet banging against metal. Beside Nealus lay two thick sticks. They were very straight, and each had been sharpened at one end. Nealus had learned from earlier mistakes. The sticks went in easier if they were spiked.

  He crested a rise and the Karagol lay before him, the sunlight barely visible on the surface of the water. It remained black, with only the faintest trace of fire reflected upon it, like pitch set to burning. Once the girl was dead, he’d park nearby and wait until full dark. He’d chosen the spot earlier, marked by two young pines that had been brought down crossways. It wouldn’t take much effort to move the topmost and make them perpendicular.

  After that, he would tie the corpse to the trees and wait for them to come for him.

  98

  Parker caught Griffin on his cell phone as he was leaving his house, the chief having headed home to change his clothing after hours spent trudging through the Ouachita.

  ‘It’s Nealus Cade,’ said Parker, and told Griffin of what he had found at the garage.

  ‘Jesus. Look, this may have nothing to do with it, but Kel Knight just got a call from a woman named Nora McCullough. Her daughter Maryanne didn’t come home from school today. Kel told her not to panic, and to check with Maryanne’s friends, because they were all sent home early due to a problem with the heating. Now, though—’

  ‘Nealus drives a red Nissan coupe, but he has another vehicle, a Dodge,’ said Parker. ‘He told me it was undergoing repairs, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have lied.’

  ‘We’ll find it – and him. Stay at the garage for now until I can get someone up there to relieve you.’

  Parker didn’t want to stay at the garage. He wanted to hunt for Nealus Cade, but he could understand Griffin’s reasons for asking him to remain there.

  ‘Okay, I’ll do it,’ he agreed, reluctantly.

  Which was when a silver Acura came round the bend, slowed at the forecourt, then continued on its way, but not before Parker caught a clear view of the driver.

  ‘He’s here,’ said Parker to Griffin. ‘It’s Nealus.’

  Nealus Cade put his foot down but didn’t panic. In a way, this was the best outcome he could have hoped for. He hadn’t wanted his brother to be the one to corner him at the end, just as he hadn’t wanted it to be Griffin or his people. Jurel had managed to cover up Nealus’s killing of Patricia Hartley and block any attempt Griffin might have made to involve the state police in the Kernigan investigation. But Parker was an outsider, and unbeholden to the people of the county or the state. To bury the truth of what Nealus had done, they would have to bury Parker as well, and Parker didn’t strike Nealus as the kind of man who’d go down easily.

  The final act was never destined to take place at the gas station. Oddly, his father had dictated the setting by insisting on placing a big sign on the main Kovas site, trumpeting the company’s arrival and thus advertising his own arrogance. Everything would conclude there with a crucified girl, and the land would be poisoned forever as a consequence.

  But it had been poisoned all along, as Nealus knew, poisoned ever since some explorer with a smattering of classical education had come upon this place, naming it Karagol, and men were foolish enough to raise a settlement nearby. Nealus’s acts were simply the natural conclusion to a sequence of events that had begun a century and a half earlier. It might even have been said that the land made him do it, because he and his family were a product of it. The land was in their blood, and their blood was bad as a consequence.

  Maryanne McCullough had stopped kicking. Perhaps she sensed a change in circumstances with the acceleration of the car and now had hope. She might even have cause for it. Nealus was no longer sure he’d have time to kill her, or not as he might have wished. He’d try, though, he certainly would. He’d thought about dumping Sallie Kernigan’s body at the site, but he hadn’t enjoyed killing her as much as the others, and her death had not been a matter of choice, but necessity. It had been her bad luck to turn up the narrow road to her home just as Nealus was dragging away the unconscious body of her child.

  But the appositeness of this conclusion was appealing to him: a chase, a confrontation, and an arrest on property earmarked for Kovas, with a dead girl at his feet. Besides, he didn’t think he’d get another chance. Whatever happened in the minutes to come, no more young women would pass through his hands, which was a source of regret to him. What began as revenge had transmuted into something much greater.

  Nealus Cade had become a god of ruination.

  Parker was trying to stay on the phone with Evan Griffin, but the signal kept cutting out. Louis was following behind in the Mustang, Angel having elected to stay at the garage and wait for whomever Griffin might be sending.

  ‘Where’s he—?’

  Griffin cut out for the third time. By now, Parker was beginning to tire of hitting redial. When Griffin’s voice came through for the fourth time, Parker didn’t bother with any niceties. He knew now where Nealus Cade was heading.

  ‘The big Kovas site,’ he said. ‘Just get to it.’

  Nealus could now see the Karagol to the west, like a smear of dirt on a painting of the landscape. He turned toward it. As he did so, Parker’s car appeared in Nealus’s rearview mirror, a second vehicle close behind. Nealus was only a minute ahead of them, but a minute was all he required. He was approaching the main Kovas site on the left, with its bright new sign promising a bright new future to which Nealus, by his actions, would give the lie.

  But then a Cargill PD patrol car pulled out fr
om among the trees at the site entrance, and another ascended from behind the brow of a hill a little way farther down the road. Nealus twisted the wheel to the right, sending the Acura over a shallow ditch and through the fence that marked the boundary of the Karagol Holding. The lake was ahead of him as he bounced over the rough ground, coming to a sideways halt by the low brow that surrounded it. As he did so, the trunk popped open, and it was a miracle that the McCullough girl wasn’t sent sailing into the air. Instead her body slammed against the upper frame of the trunk, breaking two of her ribs but also preventing her from being thrown from the car. Nealus got out and ran to grab her, but some preservation instinct caused the girl not to try to run, or even fight, but to pull the trunk closed again with her bound hands. Nealus heard it lock, but the keys were still in the ignition, and he didn’t have time to get to them, not with the pursuit cars now pouring through the gap he’d left in the fence. He retreated up the bank of the lake, stones slipping beneath his feet as he climbed, until he was standing above them all, watching his destiny unfold. One, two, three, four cars, the first of them now grinding to a stop before him. Evan Griffin emerged from it, already reaching for his gun. Kel Knight came next, then Parker, and finally a black man whom Nealus did not recognize, but who had been with Parker back at the garage.

  Nealus was happy now, happier than he had been since his mother died.

  Griffin raised the gun and leveled it at him. He didn’t look angry, just sad, as though he had expected better of Nealus.

  ‘Have you got a weapon, son?’ he asked.

  ‘I have a knife.’

  ‘Then throw it aside and get down on your knees.’

  ‘I don’t think so, not yet.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I want you to listen.’

  ‘Okay, I’m listening.’

  But Nealus was looking beyond Griffin, to where Parker stood. He also had a gun drawn, as did Kel Knight and the black man. Nealus thought that Knight didn’t seem happy at having an unknown black man standing so close to him with a sidearm, but the black man didn’t appear bothered one way or the other.