Rockabilly Hell

by William W. Johnstone

  “You’re a damn liar, Warren,” the woman said. “How about that bimbo you were humping? What happened to her?”

  “How did you know . . .?” the judge bit back his words.

  “You told her to meet you where the old Highway One roadhouse used to stand,” the woman said. “She told her father where she was going. Then she dropped off the face of the earth. And we all know what happened to her. So don’t get high and mighty with us.”

  “Look,” a very senior state trooper said. “So these people have a tape recording from a man who is now dead. That tape is worthless. We didn’t kill Billy Jordan, and we didn’t order him killed. We had nothing to do with it. Those . . . things killed him. But I agree this Cole Younger person and Katti Baylor just might give us some problems. Unless we can stop them.” He looked at the sheriff of the county where the County Line club used to be. “Your boys blew it last night.”

  “We didn’t have enough time to set it up, Curtis. And my deputy never dreamed Younger would turn north on the interstate. It wasn’t a logical move.”

  “They never are,” the veteran highway cop said.

  “Let’s don’t start bickering among ourselves,” a district judge said. “That will accomplish nothing. What we have to decide now, right now, is what to do about these meddlers.”

  “There is only one thing to do,” a state senator said. “And we all know what that is.”

  “I agree,” a man said. “I am not going to sit idly by and have my reputation ruined by these people.”

  “Wait a minute,” another man spoke up. “Listen to me. Most of us have had no dealings with the honky-tonks in whatever area we’re from in years. Any honky-tonk. The only thing we have in common, most of us, is our knowledge of the... well, beings that linger around those old places. I mean, okay, so a lot of us were rowdy in our youth. We joint-jumped. Big deal, so did a lot of other people. And like us, they’ve settled down. We’re not in cahoots with these . . . creatures. It isn’t as if we have any control over what they do, for we don’t. I say it’s time to go public with what we know, and take the consequences.”

  “Do you realize what you’re saying, Gerald?” a state representative asked. “Or better yet, what you’re asking us to do? I couldn’t get elected outhouse inspector, if this were made public. We’d all be objects of ridicule and quite possibly any number of lawsuits. And maybe prison. So what if we can’t be linked directly with any of the many disappearances over the years. The dumbest cop in the world would smell a rat five minutes after you opened your mouth. He’d start adding it all up, and the next thing we knew, we’re all up to our necks in shit. No. I’m sorry, but no. It’s unfortunate about these two people—and I’m really sick about it—but I’ve got kids to put through college, a mortgage to pay off, and a future. No. I say we silence them. Any way we can.”

  “My pension would go right out the window,” the senior highway cop said. “I agree with you, Maxwell.”

  Only a few sided with Gerald, including Sheriff Pickens, although silently and half-heartedly. The US Senator said, “I’m out of this. As of right now, I don’t know any of you people.”

  “Don’t be a fool!” one of the women said. “Most of us are campaign contributors of yours. That alone means we’re in this together. I agree with Maxwell. It’s unfortunate. I’m sorry about it. I truly am. But we’ve got to look out for number one.” She shook her head. “I have never understood what an educated, well-respected teacher from Memphis was doing in that white-trash joint to begin with.”

  “Asking for directions,” a chief deputy said. “He got lost. Some road whore started coming on to him, and Steve Deal invited the man outside to fight. When the guy wouldn’t fight, Steve sucker-punched him, and that’s when Sheriff Pickens’s kid jumped in the middle of it and started kicking the guy. The teacher managed to get outside and was running up the road, when the Pickens kid ran over him with his truck. They dragged the body around back and dropped it into an old privy pit.”

  “How convenient for your son that you personally led the investigation, Sheriff Pickens,” another of the women said acidly.

  The sheriff flushed red, but said nothing.

  “Is the body still there?”

  “The bones are, I’m sure.”

  “And now we all know about it,” a judge said sarcastically.

  “Yes,” a state representative said. “Speaking for myself, I certainly could have done without that information. We’re just getting in deeper and deeper.”

  “And if one falls, we all fall,” the US Senator reminded the group.

  “You’re an asshole, Bergman,” Sheriff Pickens said to the man.

  The Senator smiled. “I assure you, Pickens, I’ve been called much worse.”

  * * *

  Cole picked up the ringing phone. “Jim here, Cole. I just spoke with a friend on the Memphis PD. Your Billy Jordan was murdered in his home last night. It was really macabre. He was torn all to pieces.”

  “They got him for talking to me.”

  “They?”

  “The . . . well, things . . . goddammit, Jim. You know who I’m talking about.”

  “Cole, if they’re dead, what harm could come to them by a old man talking to you?”

  Cole sighed. “I know it doesn’t make any sense. I haven’t worked out that part of it yet. But I will. Anything else happening on your end?”

  “Bev and Gary headed for their assignments. You and Katti just relax for a couple of days. I’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  Katti worked on her story and Cole read everything he could find on ghosts, the supernatural, unexplained sightings, the Devil, and related material. Katti had a computer with a modem, so Cole had Jim E-mail him any new information he could find on the murder of Billy Jordan. Several people who lived along that lonely road said they saw strange lights the evening Billy was murdered. Sparkling lights, dots, sort of like a kid’s lighted sparkler, and sort of all connected.

  Connected like what?

  They looked sort of like a human shape.

  The reports were dismissed as nothing more than overactive imaginations.

  But Cole smiled. “Got you!” he whispered. “I believe I can beat you.”

  Katti looked up from her work. “Did you say something to me, Cole?”

  “Just talking to myself.”

  “I do it all the time. Comes from living alone.”

  Jim reported that the murder of Billy Jordan was now considered to be the work of drug-crazed hippies, who were passing through, and robbed and murdered the old man in some sort of perverted sexual rite. Hippies being what they are.

  “Bullshit!” Katti said. “The sheriff of that county is in this up to his nose.”

  “Sure he is. Now all we have to do is prove it.”

  On the fourth day out, Bev returned from Arkansas, where she had been posing as a artist who was looking for a piece of property to buy. Gary was still up in Missouri.

  Bev and Jim came out to Katti’s house. “A big meeting was held at the estate of one Victoria Staples the day after you two made a run for it out of the county. Practically every name that Billy mentioned on that tape was in attendance. And the list is very impressive.”

  “But what do they have to do with these . . . well, hell, ghosts?” Cole questioned.

  Bev smiled and sipped her coffee. “Most of them didn’t even know each other until about ten years ago. Right after Tommy was reported missing, and Steve Deal and Joyce Rushing killed each other in a wild gunfight.”

  “Billy didn’t tell us that,” Katti said.

  “No. People don’t talk about that incident. Steve and Joyce were living together, as they had done off and on for years. He was a thug and she was a whore. One night they got into a shouting argument and Steve hit her—this is conjecture—she came up off the floor with a gun and shot him. He staggered over to a dresser or table and grabbed his pistol. Then they stood face-to-face in the living room and shot it out. Em
ptied their pistols. Each one was shot six times.”

  “Nice people,” Katti muttered.

  Bev said, “Ace Black and Curly Williams were both killed by the father of a fourteen-year-old girl they’d found walking alongside a road. They raped her repeatedly . . . among other sexual perversions. The father is still in prison.”

  “Whatever happened to justice in this country?” Katti said, some heat behind her words.

  “Paula McCord and Gloria Kendrick were killed during a high speed chase on Interstate 55 ... after they ran over and killed a six-year-old boy. They were both drunk. It would have been Paula’s fifth DWI in ten years,” she added drily. “But she still had a driver’s license.”

  “I know that story all too well,” Cole said. “A friendly judge.”

  “She was fucking him, among other things,” Bev said. “Judge Roscoe Evans is rather kinky in his sexual appetites.”

  “Is he still on the bench?” Cole asked.

  “Oh, yes. District judge.”

  “What finally brought all these people together?” Katti asked.

  “A series of coincidences and happenstance. They all were pretty rowdy in their younger days, and that stretches from about 1950 to 1975. Their ages range from mid-forties to mid-seventies. Geographically, my group runs from West Memphis to the Missouri/Arkansas line. Gary is working the bootheel of Missouri on up to Cairo, Illinois. He’s pretty much finding the same thing. These people all discovered the ... well, might as well get used to saying it . . . ghosts that inhabit these old clubs or club sites. And it was accidental. By this time, the older ones had given up their honky-tonking and were making careers for themselves. They didn’t know what to do with this knowledge of the supernatural. They certainly couldn’t go public with it; they’d become the objects of ridicule and their careers would fade like the wind. So they remained silent. But, on occasion, they’d go back to these sites just to see if what they suspected was true. It was, of course, and they began running into each other. That’s conjecture on my part, and so is this: They formed a club, and at the beginning, it was all innocent enough. None of them had broken any major laws in their rowdy days. It was just a bunch of mostly highly successful men and women getting together once a month to laugh about their secret. But then the truth began to sink in, as one by one, they realized all the unsolved murders, disappearances, rapes, and assaults over the decades were being committed by these honky-tonk ghosts——”

  “But what to do about it?” Cole picked it up. “They couldn’t go public now, because they faced the possibility of being charged with accessories to all these charges.”

  “Exactly,” Bev said. “They were all in a trap. Trapped just as surely as these ghosts were trapped.”

  “I can’t believe the charge of accessory would stick,” Katti said.

  “Oh, I don’t either. How the hell could anyone try a ghost in a court of law?” She looked at Cole and smiled.

  He nodded his head. “Sure. Some of them made a pact with these ghosts. How many of their enemies or political opponents or competitors in business have vanished over the years?”

  “There you have it,” Bev said.

  “Son of a bitch!” Jim said.

  “Somehow, they lured people to these old places, and let the ghosts do their dirty work?” Katti asked, very dubiously.

  “Has to be,” Cole said. “But it must have really gotten scary for them when the sheriffs son got involved in Tommy Baylor’s disappearance.”

  “I’m sure it did,” Bev said. “I spoke to one very disgruntled ex-employee of Victoria Staples. He said that about three years ago, the monthly meetings stopped abruptly. This meeting a few days ago was the first one since that time.”

  “So we spooked the group bad enough for them to call an emergency meeting,” Cole said with a smile.

  “Let me say something else,” Bev said. “I don’t know much about the supernatural; as a matter of fact, I don’t know anything at all about it. I don’t think my mind has fully accepted what we’re dealing with here. I believe everything that Cole and Katti told us, but yet——”

  “I know,” Cole interrupted her. “Believe me, I felt the same way. Until a few days ago, when those things attacked us at the old club site. Now Billy’s been ripped apart like he was fed through a meat grinder. But nothing human did it, right, Jim?”

  The P.I. shook his head. “Not according to what I heard. He was mangled.”

  “And the burial was real hurry-up,” Bev said. “Closed casket, of course.” She looked first at Katti, then cut her eyes back to Cole. “What about these sparkling dots people claim to have seen that night?”

  “The souls of the dead,” Cole spoke the words softly.

  Bev suddenly felt cold. She hugged herself and could not contain a shiver of dread at the thought.

  “But that also brings up some interesting points,” Cole said. “The dead who linger at these old honky-tonks, as long as they stay within a certain boundary, can materialize in whole, or be invisible. But when they wander outside those boundaries, their souls become what they really are: electricity.”

  “What?” Jim blurted, clearly startled by the words.

  “Many writers about the supernatural agree that the soul is pure electricity. That would account for the sparkling dots that were seen.” He leaned back, a smile on his lips. “And I think I know now why they’re here, and also how to fight them.”

  “There are times, Cole,” Jim said, “when I wish I had taken my mother’s advice and gone into business with my dad. This is one of those times.”

  “What did your dad do?” Katti asked.

  Jim smiled. “He was a mortician.”

  The tension in the room disappeared as the four of them sat and laughed until tears were running down their cheeks.

  Seven

  The incessant ringing of the phone woke Cole. He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Four o’clock. Katti turned and muttered something about the damned phone. Cole fumbled around and stilled the ringing.

  “Cole? Jim. I’m at the office. It’s been tossed but good. Place looks like a tornado went through it. Here’s the strange part: no alarms were tripped. Gary got back into town late and wanted to put his notes away in the safe. He discovered the mess.”

  “Ghosts don’t trip alarms, Jim.” Cole was reaching for his pants as he spoke.

  Katti sat up in bed at those words.

  “Yeah. You’re right about that. A taxi driver has come forward and told the cops he saw some strange sparkling objects hovering around the building about midnight. He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Cole? Did those damn creatures, whatever the hell they are, follow you from Arkansas?”

  “No. Why should they? Think about it. How many honky-tonks were in the Memphis area back in the fifties and sixties?”

  Silence on the other end for a few heartbeats. “Yeah. Jesus. Cole! If that’s the case, this could be nationwide!”

  “Probably is. Hell, I’m sure of that. It would certainly account for the hundreds of unsolved crimes and disappearances each year, wouldn’t it?” His eyes caught a flash of sparkling light outside the house. “Jim? They’re here.” He hung up the phone and glanced at Katti; she was dressing faster than she’d ever had before.

  Cole slipped his feet into loafers and pulled on his shirt, then picked up the stun gun on the nightstand. “Now we see if my hunch was right,” he muttered. “Stay right with me, Katti,” he said.

  “Don’t you worry about that, buddy. I’m glued to you.”

  “Let’s get out of the house. I don’t want these things flopping around in here forever.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s going to be flopping around?”

  “You’ll see. If this works.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  “We’re dead.”

  Katti grabbed his arm. “Listen. Is that humming?”

  Cole listened. “Yeah. Rock Around the Clock.”

 
; “Very amusing.”

  “Yeah. Hysterical.”

  Katti watched another sparkling shape materialize outside the bedroom window. “Which is what I’m very likely to become at any moment.”

  He handed her the keys to the Bronco. “You get to the truck and crank it up. I’ll hold these damn things off. I hope.”

  The humming of the old rock and roll song abruptly ceased. The early morning was very quiet. Katti’s car was in the garage, the Bronco parked behind it, outside. Cole put his left hand on the front doorknob, the stun gun held in his right hand. He had rigged a leather strap with a snap-buckle, so the stun gun could not be jerked away from him. But he could release it if he felt his arm was about to be broken or torn off.

  “Ready?” he whispered to Katti.

  The sounds of “Ready Teddy” suddenly blasted the night.

  “They know what we’re thinking and what we’re doing,” Katti whispered.

  “What we’re doing. I don’t believe they know what we’re thinking.”

  “You hope.”

  Cole jerked open the front door and was confronted by a huge blob of sparkling dots, more or less in human form. Cole jammed the points of the stun gun into the neck area and hit the button.

  There was a very violent flash of light, and the smell of rotting, putrid, and seared flesh became very nearly overpowering. The round mass of sparkling dots that Cole guessed was the head of the thing, was torn loose from the trunk and went bouncing and rolling across the lawn. The arms of the creature flailed the air, grabbing blindly and wildly at the spot where Cole and Katti had been.

  But they had ducked around the glob of dots and were running for the Bronco.

  The sparkling head began bouncing up and down like a fluorescent basketball, higher and higher. A thin scream of what appeared to be pain filled the air. The two other lighted shapes paused where they were, watching the head bounce high into the air. The headless shape was blundering around, running into trees and frantically ripping up bushes and shrubs and slinging them all about in its blind fury.

  Katti jumped into the Bronco as Cole ran up to another of the sparkling shapes and hit it with the stun gun, right in the center of what he hoped was its back.