by Max Wilde
She stepped under the shower and soaped and scrubbed herself until her skin was pink and stinging. Went at her hair with her fingers, tearing out chunks that were matted with blood, using her nails to break down the clots, the water sluicing red down the plughole. After what seemed like forever the water ran clear and Skye shut off the shower and dried herself.
When she slid her tongue across her teeth and felt it snagging, she got her face close to the mirror, pulling her lips back in a grimace, and saw chunks of flesh lodged between her teeth. Another flashback assaulted her: a hand (not hers, she swore, despite the watch on the wrist) tearing a human heart from its housing, the flabby thing still pumping gouts of blood as the first bite was taken.
It was all she could do to uncoil a strip of dental floss and go at her teeth, yanking free each unspeakable clot of meat, spitting into the basin.Working a fresh length of floss between each tooth, right up to the gum, until her own blood flowed salty onto her tongue.
She rinsed the basin and flushed away the strips of bloody floss, facing herself in the mirror again. The only evidence of what she had done was pushed down deep along with the thing that slumbered in her.
But when she realized she could see without her glasses, Skye knew that the years of self-imposed myopia, of shutting herself away from the world, were over.
4
The night had begun as most nights did for Skye. She’d given Timmy his dinner and waited until the babysitter, Maria Martinez—plump and pretty and tardy as usual—had rushed in with her bag stuffed with knitting, gossip magazines and horror DVDs.
Skye kissed Timmy goodbye, seeing the hard, unsmiling angles of her brother’s face beneath the sweet softness of her six-year-old nephew’s. Her brother was a good man. A saint, people said. But she prayed each day that the boy would grow up free of the ghosts that haunted his father, that seemed to hollow him from within.
Skye made it in time to meet Richie down on the corner, near the rusting water tower, and get a ride to the diner in his clattering pick-up, the name of a long-dead plumber still painted in fading letters on the doors. Richie grunted a greeting and then said nothing as they drove through the scatter of low houses and strip malls that flanked the road into town.
Richie was maybe twenty and Skye remembered him from school, a loner a few years ahead of her. After he dropped out she’d seen him pumping gas at Earl’s garage. When she also dropped out—some unfocused fear keeping her grades way below her potential, keeping her safe from being sent off to college with all its dangers—and started working at Earl’s diner at night, Richie had stopped for her when he saw her walking into town.
At first Skye was worried that he was going to hit on her, but that never happened. He seemed totally disinterested, the rides to the diner some polite reflex. He worked until dawn and she usually got a ride home with Minty, an older divorcee who waited tables with her. If Minty wasn’t chasing men, that was. Or allowing them to catch her.
Skye stared out at the mean little town, shrinking now as the big city far to the north leeched its young, its umbilical connection to its ghetto twin across the border its only lifeblood. And now with the fence and the border patrols that too was shrinking.
Richie parked in the strip of bays by the diner, muttered something and walked toward the pumps.
Skye pushed her way through the glass doors into Earl’s little Formica fiefdom, a showpiece forty years ago, the old folks said. Now the red chairs were leaking stuffing, the yellow tables were chipped and the back-lit slides of sundaes and burgers on the walls had faded to a greenish monochrome.
“Minty’s late,” Earl said, popping up in the kitchen hatch like a glove puppet.
He was one of those guys who were born old, Skye reckoned. His skin like a worn out suit, creased and wrinkled, hanging from his bones.
Skye ducked into the locker room beside the kitchen and snagged her apron and the dumb little cloth hat with EARL’S stitched on the side and went back out.
“You’ll have to handle the dinner crowd,” Earl said.
Skye nodded, looking across the deserted diner. Maybe a couple of truckers would come in before midnight, drawn from the interstate up north by the glow of lights, and nurse a cup of Earl’s dishwater coffee while their rigs pinged and creaked outside.
The door clattered open and Minty sashayed in, pausing a moment to suck the last life out of her Marlboro, then she leaked her smoke out into the night through nostrils and painted mouth, flicked away her cigarette and cat-walked her way across the dinner, her high heels clicking like disapproving tongues.
“You’re late,” Earl said through the hatch.
“I’m here, ain’t I?” Minty gave Skye a wink as she headed into to the locker room.
Earl watched her ass beneath her tight skirt and Skye swore she could see the desire rising from the man in waves. He slammed the door of the icebox and clattered plates, taking his frustration out on his tools. He’d carried a torch for Minty for too many years, sharpened by the succession bikers and truckers and deadbeats who’d found their way into Minty’s bed and into her heart. Stood stoic and mute as he’d watched her being driven away in semis and on the back of Harleys, swearing never to return, only to creep back a few days later, contrite, nursing hangovers and black eyes.
A rig fumed into the parking lot and stopped with a wheeze of air brakes. The trucker, tall and young enough to catch Minty’s fancy, shouldered his way in, frisbeed his John Deere cap onto a table and slid into a booth. Minty smoothed down her apron and oozed past Skye, speaking out the corner of her mouth.
“This one’s mine, hon.”
Yeah, I bet he is, Skye thought. Minty leaned over the trucker, showing him her powdered cleavage, her false eyelashes fluttering like mating butterflies as she sucked on her pencil.
Skye watched it all play out: the trucker downed his coffee and left and within minutes Minty was felled by one of her migraines, Earl plying her with aspirin that she drank to placate him, winking over her shoulder at Skye as she went off into the night to meet the loser at a bar somewhere, Skye’s ride gone with her.
It was close to midnight when Earl closed the kitchen, Skye still working up the courage to ask him to take her home, when a big black car gargled its way up to the pumps, drawing Richie from his hutch. Four men left the car and the one riding shotgun, a cocky little guy, pointed under the hood.
Richie lifted the lid, propping it up with a stick, the hood yawning open like a gaping mouth as he leaned in to check the oil. The runt knocked the stick loose, catching the lid just before it slammed down on the kid, his high laugh cutting the night as Richie banged his head trying to get out the way.
Three of the men came into the diner, one of them holding the door open for the small man who was dressed in clothes that were ugly but expensive. The fourth, the driver, stood by the car smoking, staring out at nothing.
The cocky one came up to the counter where Earl was locking up the cash register.
“Sorry, boys,” Earl said, “We’re closed.”
“That says different,” the short guy pointed toward the OPEN sign dangling from the door. There was something foreign mixed into his voice.
“Kitchen’s closed.”
“You mean we’re not going to be able to sample your fine cuisine?” A laugh like an ungreased axle.
Earl said, “How about Skye here gives you fellows coffee to go? On the house?”
The small man’s eyes, slanty and heavy lidded, skidded across to Skye. “That right, beautiful?” Making a lie of the last word, his buddies chuckling.
Skye didn’t reply as she poured coffee into foam cups, her back to the men.
“You lock up good and tight after you, hear me girl?” Earl said as he brushed past her.
“Yes,” she said, turning to the men as Earl clattered out. “Black or cream?”
“Oh, baby, from you it's gotta be cream,” the scrawny one said, doing a little thing with his hips, his friends’ laughter the b
ass chorus to his falsetto.
Skye poured the cream, stirring it into the coffees, the little whirls of white like seashells, blocking out the voices of the men as she sealed the cups and seated them in a cardboard tray, adding paper sachets of sugar and plastic spoons.
One of the bigger men took the tray from her and the runt seized her arm before she could get it back across the counter.
“Could we maybe offer you a ride, Skye, in our limousine?”
“My brother’ll be along presently,” she said, wishing it were true. “The chief deputy sheriff.”
“Well, now, Deppity Dawg hisself,” the small man said in his idea of a peckerwood accent. “Hear that, boys? This little peach is kin to the law.”
The two men laughed, but they were restless and the little guy shrugged and turned and they followed in his wake as they went out to the car. The big man was behind the wheel, gunning the engine, the other three barely inside before he sped off with a scream of smoking tires, the car fishtailing as it flew out of the lot and onto the road, red taillights bleeding into the night.
Skye stood in the sudden hush, the silence broken only by the whirring and ticking of the Coca-Cola wall clock. Her hand was on the telephone, ready to call her brother and ask him to come and get her. The sheriff’s office was three blocks away and her brother would have done it without complaint—or no spoken complaint. But his irritation would have been thick in the air of the cruiser as he drove, letting her know that his time was too valuable to taxi his sister home from her meaningless job. A job that didn’t even keep her in pocket money.
So Skye stowed her apron and hat, killed the lights and locked the doors, passing Richie in his cubicle, nose in a book, making no response to her wave.
The town was quiet this time of night, and she could hear a snatch of guitar music swirling over the border fence, then nothing but the croon of the night insects. It was warm, the heat trapped by the shroud of cumulus that obscured the moon, and she felt beads of sweat on her upper lip as she left behind the last of the squat buildings, the pot-holed pavement stuttering out and giving way to dirt.
Skye had reached the ruins of the roadhouse, just a tumble of rotten roof beams lying like a discarded game of pick up sticks on the concrete slab, when she heard that squeal of a laugh and then saw the big car parked off the road, the glow of a match coming from inside.
She caught the acrid stink leaking from the lowered windows and hurried on, willing herself into invisibility but she hadn’t gone far, the water tower on its skinny legs still a distant silhouette, when she heard the growl of the engine and the headlamps warmed the sand around her.
They toyed with her, letting her increase her stride to that of a speed-walker, the driver juicing the gas just enough to keep pace, letting her run, all the while holding their position behind her, only surging forward when she fled the road and onto the sand, the desert a flat table top stretching down to the border.
And Skye ran, ran faster than she ever had at the track meets at school, pumping her legs and arms, sprinting, running from herself as much as she was running from the men.
5
Sheriff Dellbert Drum was smart enough to know that he was dumb as a box full of hammers, and it didn’t perturb him in the slightest, never had done. He held no truck with this business of broadening the mind, in fact he’d spent a lifetime narrowing his down to the very essentials. Being dumb didn’t preclude low cunning, and that he had in abundance.
And he also possessed certain gifts: a photographic memory, for one. Growing up dyslexic and barely literate had made this a necessity. So, when tight-assed little Gene Martindale had turned his back on him at the crime scene and gone off to stare at the mess of body parts like one of those heads was going to tell him what in the name of sweet Jesus had befallen it, and Drum spied the ruined pair of eyeglasses nearly hidden in the dirt beneath a clump of agave, he knew immediately they belonged to the Chief Deputy’s sister.
What was left of the glasses lay on the seat beside him, safely encased in a ziplock bag, as Drum drove the Ford deep into his own county. The frame of the glasses was broken in two, snapped at the bridge, and one of the lenses was gone. The other lens was cracked and splattered with blood. Not the girl’s blood, he was prepared to wager.
What had made Drum so sure that these eyeglasses belonged to Skye Martindale was the blue paper clip employed in place of a screw where the left arm hinged. He’d been over to Earl’s diner for a cup of coffee a few days before, and when Skye had served him, barely lifting her feet as she scuffed her way to his booth, her mousy hair hanging over her face, he glimpsed the paper clip, and wondered how Martindale could let his sister be seen like that in polite company.
So Drum hadn’t questioned the impulse that had him squatting down (surprisingly loose-limbed for such a big man) and snagging the broken eyeglasses, hiding them in his giant paw while he got into his vehicle. When he’d had a chance to examine the glasses, under the dome light of the Ford a safe distance from the crime scene, he’d been pleased to note a mousy blonde hair trapped in the grasp of the paper clip. A DNA test would tell a merry tale.
As he drove along the main road leading toward what had once been the county seat and was now little more than a ghost town, Drum slid a cell phone from his top pocket and prodded at it with a massive digit. The phone purred for long enough to get him riled up, and he had to contain his temper when he heard his nephew’s sleepy voice.
“Yeah?”
“Richie, this here is Uncle Dellbert.”
“Yessir.”
“You alive and kickin’ boy?”
“Yessir.” Sounding like he was down deep in a well.
“You seen a Dodge Charger down your way?”
“Black?”
“As the night.”
“One came on here to get gassed up.”
“What time would that have been?”
“Midnight, I reckon.”
“The men in it, they go into the diner?”
“Yessir, they did.”
“That Martindale girl workin’ tonight?” A pause. “Speak up, boy, goddamit fore I come over there and beat you like a rented mule.”
“Yessir. She was workin’.”
“She get a ride home, maybe?”
“No sir, she walked.”
Drum heard the sound of a car through the phone. “Somebody there, boy?”
“Chief Deputy Martindale’s just come on, sir.”
“Okay, you go and attend to him. Tell him all you told me, but don’t mention we spoke, you hear me?”
“Yessir.”
As he crested a rise, Drum saw the flickering neon of the Milky Way Motel. A sparkling constellation in its hey-day, the sign was reduced now to one stuttering yellow asterisk, like a faded star of Bethlehem leading him to the domain of the fallen man of God who cooked meth and ran harlots from the tumbled remains of the motor court.
The men in the Dodge, hotshots from the big city, part of a syndicate, had come down to tithe the smaller operators. They’d threatened Reverend Jimmy Tincup who had opened a dialogue with them on Drum’s advice, while he planned on how to deal with this. But now it was no longer their problem. Something he’d relish telling Tincup, but tonight his business was with somebody else.
As he neared the rundown motel, the neon jerking and jittering like a meth whore, Drum turned off the blacktop and onto sand, heading toward the clump of single-wides that were surrendering themselves to the desert.
Until the rampage of bloodletting five years before that had caught Gene Martindale’s wife and unborn child in its wake, these trailers had housed Reverend Jimmy Tincup’s flock. Nothing to rival a compound like Waco in its prime, but it had provided Tincup with a steady supply of fresh pussy, a gaggle of brats and men young and stupid enough to do his bidding. Then Junior Cotton and his rancid bitch went rogue and the flock was dispersed, leaving the preacher dreaming of faded glory.
As the Ford bucked and bounced across
the dirt, Drum reviewed the situation around the slicks in the Charger. The why of it all was plain to see: big city gunsels who thought they could muscle in on the turf of backwoods meth cookers. It was the how that had been irking Drum. How had they known about Tincup and his trade, here in the middle of nowhere?
Drum had arrived at an answer. A hunch, to be sure, but an educated one, and since he wasn’t in a courtroom, there was no need to trouble himself with the burden of proof.
He stopped the Ford outside the least dilapidated of the trailers, the only one that was occupied. No electricity out here, so a candle threw a shadow show against the cloth that covered the window. Leaving his hat in the car, he took a brown paper bag from the glove box and went up to the door of the single-wide, tapping lightly.
“Yeah?” A female voice. Scratchy. Agitated.
“It’s me, darlin’.”
A bolt was drawn and the door swung open, revealing a disheveled woman somewhere between thirty and death, a nest of dirty blonde hair sprouting from her skull.
“Dellbert, Jesus. I’m climbin’ the fuckin’ walls.”
“Relax, Holly. I come bearin’ gifts.”
The woman backed into the trailer, the place stinking of mold and disuse, the stars visible through a gash in the roof. The single-wide had been uninhabited for years before Holly, Tincup’s oldest serving wife, had crossed him one too many times and was banished out here two weeks ago.
She slumped down at the table, her bitten fingernails scratching at the scuffed wood, the candle yellow lighting the wrinkled face of a seasoned junkie. Drum knew he was right in his suspicions when he saw a flash of chrome as she palmed a little cell phone and disappeared it into her dirty jeans. Reverend Tincup prohibited his flock from using the things, the only voice he ever wanted them to hear was his.
Drum entered the cramped trailer in an awkward crouch keeping his head away from the ceiling and his uniform clear of the filthy plywood room divider that sported a faded Sears calendar from 1999. He slid the bag across to her and she fumbled it open tipping three knotted, uninflated balloons onto the table top.