by David Beers
Matthew tapped his temple twice.
“I thought that might be the case. He wantin’ out, ain’t he?”
Matthew nodded, looking into those dark clouds.
“He wantin’ dem women, right? Wantin’ to get at ‘em, the same as he did as a teenager. I knew about it. I didn’t know how to stop it, but I knew about it. I tried to help the best I could but what’s a ninety year-old woman to do with a fifteen year-old boy so full of cum it’s practically comin’ out his ears? Not a lot. That’s what.” Sheeb glanced at the floor and pulled a drag on her cigarette. “Well, I’mma have to get him outta you one way or ‘nother, even if it means some of these women ‘round here get a little more pokin’ than they planned on. I ain’t done talkin’ with my grandson just yet.”
Matthew knew what that meant. Knew what all this meant in an intellectual fashion. It meant something inside his head had just snapped. He might not be sitting on this couch; he might be on the floor, having a seizure, bleeding from his nose and a half bitten off tongue from where his teeth clamped down. He certainly wasn’t sitting on this couch and having a conversation with a dead woman, a memory of thirty years ago or more. When she said she was going to get Arthur Morgant out of him, it meant that Arthur Morgant was coming to the front. It meant that Matthew was going to take a back seat to Morgant, or maybe he would have no seat at all—maybe he would be ejected from the entire ride.
“I need you to wait,” Matthew said, feeling as stupid as he had ever felt in his life. “I need you to wait until I’m done here.”
“You know how long I been waitin’, dear? Fifteen years was the last time I talked to him, right before they put him in that freezer. But he’s done thawed out and I need to talk to him, to tell him I need his report card and that only dem good grades gon keep him from endin’ back up in that freezer. I can’t be waitin’ no longer to tell him that.”
Matthew closed his eyes. He brought his hands together, folding them in his lap, and planted his feet firmly on the ground.
“I ain’t goin’ away foeva, dear. You know that. I might go away now but I’m gon talk to my grandson again.”
Matthew focused on his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. A circular pattern that kept him alive, a circular pattern that wasn’t going to be interrupted by any gray-eyed woman or any brain wiring gone wrong. His breathing, that’s all that mattered.
When he opened his eyes, he was alone in his apartment, the television still silent and showing a picture of what Matthew looked like in college.
12
“Where are you?” Larry asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Joe answered. He listened to his brother sigh into the phone.
“You’re going to die,” Larry said. “You’re going to get yourself killed and it’s not going to be pretty. Is that what Patti would want? This? You running around looking for that man?”
“You’ve seen the letter. We’re all going to die if someone doesn’t stop him.”
“You’re. Not. A. Fucking. Cop,” Larry almost screamed into the phone. “You’re a retired landscaper with a coke addiction. You don’t think they have other people on this? People that can do a better job than you?”
“How good of a job did those people do last time?”
Neither of them said anything for a while after that.
Joe was still in the bed and breakfast hotel, running lower on cocaine than he would like. He had his computer on, Google loaded, but nothing typed into the search bar. How many hours had he been sitting like this? Alternating between lines of cocaine and typing in a few words before deleting them just as quickly? Another day had passed since he visited the Holy Ground, as he was thinking about it. Another day and, if he was honest with himself, nowhere closer to finding Brand.
“What are you going to do that they can’t do, Joe? If you can tell me that, I might say, ‘you know, he’s right. The bastard took his son, and if he can do this better than the cops, then he has every right to be out there doing it.’ So what can you do that they can’t do?”
He could snort a hell of a lot more cocaine than they could, he knew that. Joe took the phone away from his ear and bent to the same white crusted plate he’d been using for the past two days and took up another line.
“And if I say nothing, and I come home, what then? Just live in your basement some more? That’s if Brand doesn’t accomplish what he says he will.”
“Maybe. Maybe you live a few more days. Is there anything so wrong with that? Just tell me, what you’re going to do that they can’t do.”
Maybe Larry was right. He was holed up in a hotel room, snorting blow and making failed attempts at Google searches. He’d been up for two days, and what did he have to show for it?
“I can’t stop. I can’t just not look for him.”
“Yes, you can. You can come home and you can let the police find him.”
He’d spent the last two years tracking this man—watching, waiting. Brand wasn’t going away forever, Joe never believed that. Joe had seen the man face to face and understood that what drove him went deep, that there was no cure for what Brand had caught. And now Brand was back, and he had let the world know his plans, and after all these years, Joe was doing nothing more than staring at computer screens and buying bags of cocaine. If this was it, if this was all he had in him, why not go home to his brother? Maybe get clean, maybe not, but why even stay out here spending money that would run out sooner or later while making no progress?
There was a point in time when his mind had been clear. A point when it wasn’t cocaine that kept him up, not entirely, and the same drive which he saw in Brand also ran in Joe. When he first started this, coming out of Larry’s basement like someone leaving Plato’s cave—finally understanding what life actually meant—he made more progress than the police had in the previous year. He had pictures of Arthur Morgant. He had bank account numbers. There was no doubt that Morgant was walking around, and no doubt that Brand was inside that body. Joe had even figured out Brand was most likely in the Northeast portion of the United States, which had proven out.
So what could he do next? Sniff another line and type in a few more words?
“I had him for so long and now I’ve lost him,” Joe said.
“You don’t have to be his slave. That’s what you are. Your mind is his slave.”
Joe stood up from the bed unconsciously. Something in that word shook his brain. Something about the word slave sparked some cocaine coated brain-cells.
Joe started pacing.
“What’s a slave?” He asked.
“What?” Larry said.
“Just tell me, what is a slave?”
“You do what your master says. Someone not paid. Someone forced to do labor. I don’t know, man. You’re a slave because he’s forced you to forsake your own life. He is your life now.”
“Good. Slaves don’t have choices. They do what they’re told.” He was walking fast now, ten paces one way, about face, and ten paces back. “This thing Brand is doing, it’s huge, right? I mean, you’re looking at fifty-five people that have to basically give up their lives for him. Where’s he going to get those people? He needs slaves.”
“You sound absolutely insane.”
“If he had slaves, you know, people willing to go ahead and die, this wouldn’t be a problem for him. He could blow this whole place up without ever having to worry about being caught. Where do you get slaves from?”
“I think I saw that Wal-Mart has some on sale... Are you listening to yourself, Joe? You’re rambling, man, rambling harder than Hunter S. Thompson did on his worst day.”
Joe heard nothing his brother said. He paced, back and forth, back and forth, a single “Hmmmmmm,” coming from his mouth into the phone.
“You there, man?” Larry asked.
“There’s only one type of slave trade anymore. Only one I can think of. Human trafficking. Sex slaves.”
“You stupid, stupid, man,” Matthew said. “You stupid, stupid,
little man.”
That goddamn Art Brayden.
“No. Your goddamn pride. Your arrogance as always,” Matthew said. The crosses. Convincing Brayden that he would listen to Matthew. That they were going to put his message out no matter what he had to do. And now, because of that, Matthew had a new problem.
The local cop turned FBI agent was going to find him that way, or at least try to. Jake Deschaine, a nobody until Art Brayden walked into his life and promoted him about fifty levels up, had decided that he was going to look into the lumber market. He was going to check and see if Matthew had bought the crosses all at one spot.
And. Of course. He had. Because he had been in a rush, because, as always—
You needed to show everyone how great you were, honey, Rally said. How long had it been since he heard her voice? The old black crone showing up first and now Rally had decided to say something. Saying, in her sarcastic way, that despite all his brains, he wasn’t always ahead.
“Not right now,” he said aloud, talking to Rally as if she was actually in the room with him and not something in his head. Rally was right though, he had wanted to show Brayden that he wasn’t in charge, that his whole organization didn’t matter at all because Matthew Brand had decided the world would die, and also that the world would know he killed it. So Matthew had gone to the most obscure place he could find, placed his order, and loaded all the logs up into his white van the very same day. Luckily, and it was looking very lucky right now, Matthew had made at least one smart decision this whole time. The minute he found out about Jake Deschaine leaving Texas, he set up a program to tap his cellphone. No one even thought to issue the man an FBI phone. Why would they? He wasn’t an employee. So everything that came through Jake’s phone was loaded into Matthew’s computer.
“They’ve been scraping the lumber for DNA, hoping to maybe match up a hair follicle with DNA we already have in the system, kind of back track whoever sold the wood to him. As far as I know, though, no one’s actually tried to look up where the wood was sold, because it’s wood that is found in almost any hardware store. You could literally go to four hundred hardware stores in the northern part of Mass alone. You think you’re going to find something here?”
“I don’t think it will hurt to look. He didn’t have the logs just lying around, so someone sold them to him, and it probably wasn’t some criminal who would be in our system. I doubt he would go to a chain like The Home Depot because of their tracking methods. He probably looked at a Mom and Pops, somewhere that deals in cash and not a lot of back end systems to check things. It’s worth a shot, because if I’m right, then the Mom and Pop would definitely remember him better than a chain would.”
“Go ahead then. How many people do you need?” Brayden told him.
“Maybe five, just enough to help me call lumber stores in the state.”
And, Art Brayden, with wisdom granted down from God, gave Jake the five men and they had begun calling this very day. Matthew knew Jake hadn’t called the correct number yet, but he didn’t know about the other five—they could already have found the shop, the man and his fat wife, and Matthew could only imagine what came next. Probably, Deschaine would find the exact day Matthew bought them, then he could check traffic cameras for the white van up and down I-85, and at some point, if they went slow and looked close enough, they would find him. Then they would look at the license plate and then they would track it to the fake name it was registered under and from there things would unravel quickly.
Had he done it a different way, had he not used the crosses as some symbolic gesture of bullshit, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.
You can take that all the way back, can’t ya, hun? If you hadn’t decided to burn down that restaurant, I might still be alive today. Rally didn’t say it with malice, but with a light cheer in her voice. Teasing as she had done so often in life.
“I don’t have time,” he told her. He didn’t have time for Rally or Sheeb today. He had time to drive two hundred miles south, find an old man and an old woman, and make sure that they never spoke to anyone ever again. That’s all the time Matthew could make for the day.
Quillian Woodall looked at himself feeling just a tad bit uneasy. He’d been feeling uneasy for days, if he was to be honest. Maybe up to a week. He hadn’t said anything to his wife yet, but he felt the urge to bring it up growing stronger and stronger. Even now, at five in the morning, brushing his teeth, looking in the mirror, he couldn’t stop thinking about the wood he sold that man. Twenty pieces of lumber, all of them the same size.
And those crosses. Ten of them. Twenty pieces of lumber built into pairs.
He’d seen the news, and to be honest, it made him hate being seventy years old. The picture of the black man they kept flashing up looked similar to the man he sold the wood to, but he couldn’t remember if it was actually the same man. Blacks, and maybe God didn’t like Quillian saying this, but they all looked the same. Add to that the fact that Quillian wouldn’t remember what he ate for breakfast each morning if he hadn’t eaten the same thing for the past forty years, and it made for a tough time to remember exactly who he had sold those boards to. The news said to call the police if anyone had seen the man, but had Quillian seen him? More, what could they do about it now? The man, if he was the person the police were looking for, would have certainly paid cash, and this was a week ago.
Could Quillian get in trouble for not coming forth sooner? Maybe. His Dad never liked the cops and neither did Quillian. He tolerated them well enough, but he wasn’t one of those people who considered them heroes. Quillian remembered the dogs in the sixties, how the cops had used hoses on the blacks. Quillian didn’t get involved with any of that, no, he was apprenticing at the lumber shop he still owned, but he remembered it—and he wasn’t fond of it. The people that everyone said were heroes after 9/11 had once used fire hoses on children younger than ten. For being black.
Mary walked into the bathroom behind Quillian and grabbed a washcloth. She wet it, rubbed a bit of soap on it, and started washing her face.
“Mary, you been watching the news at all? Reading it?”
“I see what you leave on when you pass out in your chair, but I just turn it off.”
Quillian spit his toothpaste into the sink and rinsed his mouth out. “There’s this guy now, I forget his name but he was pretty popular a few years back as well, and he’s saying he’s going to do some pretty bad stuff and that the police can’t catch him.”
“That so?”
“That’s what the news says anyway. They keep putting this picture up of him.”
“Oh yeah? What’s he look like?” Mary asked.
“He’s black.”
“That’s normally the type to do it.” Mary bent down and started washing the soap off her face in the other sink.
“That’s not exactly a Christian thing to say, is it?”
“God respects honesty,” she said, patting her face dry. She walked out of the bathroom to get their breakfast on the stove.
You did a fine job there of letting her know you sold some wood to a terrorist. Fine job, Quillian.
Did he sell to a terrorist though? That’s what he wanted to find out. They’d rigged up the security cameras in the store so that it was all digital now. Quillian didn’t know what the hell that meant except he didn’t have to put a new tape in every two days and that he could keep the recordings a lot longer with a computer.
He hadn’t used any of the security cameras in the past twelve years. There was a minor break-in twelve years prior, but it was just kids playing around. Broke the plate glass window and that cost a little bit of money. That’s all though, just money, and the older Quillian got, the less he cared about it. He could, if he wanted, go in today and pull up the recordings from a week ago, could try and get a better look at whoever came in. Hell, he could call that guy up who sold him the new recording contraption and ask him to do it. That’s what he’d do. He’d look into this a bit more himself bef
ore he decided to call the cops on a customer.
This thing was a headache.
Quillian firmly believed that if God had liked technology, he would have invented it. But no, the Garden of Eden had no Internet service. There weren’t cellphones, and there surely weren’t digital security cameras either. The Devil created technology; Quillian was sure of it.
He thought he finally had the correct picture up though. He’d been searching through the computer for the last hour, clicking this and that, trying to type in the correct date but never knowing exactly where to type it in at. He felt like this whole technology rush had just come on too quick. He couldn’t adjust. Mary didn’t even try. Quillian didn’t think Mary could even turn this computer on, and she was completely fine with that. It was him, the fool, always trying to keep up, always trying to figure out what the world was creating.
He should let it go. It was more of a headache than it was worth. Especially for a customer. The man had paid him money for wood and now Quillian was thinking about turning him over to the cops because he bought twenty long poles and then a day later some crazy person decides to murder and string up ten women? Maybe Quillian should shut down the store and move into a nursing home, just tell Mary he had enough and couldn’t cope anymore without someone looking after him day and night.
She’d just ask, “What do you think I do?” and go on with her day.
Anyway, Quillian was here with the tape pulled up and there really wasn’t any sense in daydreaming longer. He pressed play on the computer and watched. The black man entered, and wow, Quillian’s memory had deteriorated more than he thought possible. The man was wearing a baseball hat, so the camera couldn’t get a decent angle on his face. He was black, that was sure, and tall, but was it the man the news wanted everyone to know about? How in the hell could Quillian know by looking at this?
“What are you doing?” Mary asked. “I’m running the register by myself.”
“Then who’s running it now if you’re in here griping at me?”