“Tell them two hours, Rhino. Tell Yttri to pick me up at the farm in thirty.”
“They also have a minor in custody, some girl this guy was pandering. She’s one of ours, a seventeen-year-old from Blackhawk Locks.”
She unleashed the kids, spun them toward the wider parking lot. “You can pick up baseballs for Daddy. He’ll take you home. Mommy loves you.”
She slid the doors shut, jumped back behind the wheel, turned the key. Overhead the sky snapped bright, triggering a long, low boom of thunder. The first warm drops popped against the van’s roof. Harley’s players raced one another for the awning over the school’s front door as she sped the Kickmobile away.
40
Angus hurried as light faded from the dumping sky. The red pickup with the snowplow blade had struck the Beavers Salvage truck broadside and tipped it over and shoved it fifty feet on its side and pancaked the cab against a reef of tangled trailer frames. Angus made his decision and walked away from it. He was going to have to drive Brock Pabst’s shit-can GTO.
He reached in and turned the key. The engine shrieked and shuddered. Exhaust exploded out the back. He let it run a bit.
He fetched her body from the dregs of the snowdrift behind the Quonset shack. He worked her back into the bag and layered in the jerseys. She smelled bad now. Not rotten. She wasn’t rotten. She smelled like thawing meat.
He carried her in the bag to the GTO and opened the trunk. Pabst had jammed it full of other people’s stuff: car radios, Walmart shopping bags, hubcaps, GPS systems with plug-ins dangling, a backpack, a purse, a leaf blower, a game console. Angus shut the trunk and fit the bag onto the passenger seat and forced the door shut.
Before he left he went inside the house. Brandy was watching TV in her pajamas, smoking a cigarette. His dad in his cap-and-napkins bandage sat in a tilted slump on a chair in the kitchen, where he could see out the window. That pill bottle was in his fist. His one open eye hit Angus like a bead of lead. His chest rattled.
“The goddamn hell you think you’re doing?”
Angus flinched and lowered his brow. His whole body stiffened. All his life those exact words had given him about three seconds to run before he took a boot up his ass. But instead, his dad dropped the pill bottle.
“I came back,” Angus said quietly, “because I want to be here. I want to live here. Someday I want to play baseball here. That’s all I wanted in the first place. I want Brandy to be safe. That’s what the goddamn hell I think I’m doing.”
His dad’s big hands, all bone now, fumbled in space, looking for the dropped pill bottle like a raccoon feeling in the crick for crawdads.
“I’m going to try to make it like Beavers never touched her, which we never did, and all the ones involved will have to answer. I’m gonna put her in that cave back on Faulkner’s where the players like to take girls.”
Angus watched his dad recover the bottle and uncap it, peer into it, rattle the few half pills left in the bottom, then upend it into his mouth. He chewed, swallowed.
“I just came inside to tell you, if you’ll listen,” Angus said. “I’m undoing what they did to us. Then we’re really gonna have to watch out. They’ll come after us. Do you understand?”
His dad grinned then. There was foam from the pills in his saliva.
“Bring it on,” he said.
* * *
Through this new warm downpour Angus steered Pabst’s wobbly car up Lost Hollow Road to the ridge, onto Bluff Road and around Battle Bluff into Dog Hollow, along Dog Hollow Road past his uncle Walt’s place—it was Walt who took him to Rattlesnake Cave once, when they were out poaching deer—up and over the next ridge, then on Bottom Road past Emerald Faulkner’s property to the Upper Rush Creek bridge. In the GTO’s crooked headlights the creek streamed beyond its banks, brown and foamy and full of stick litter from the forest floor, sweeping whole branches along. Just beyond the bridge, an old dirt road led upstream to the cave, a quarter mile, maybe.
He couldn’t risk it with the GTO. He drove in just far enough to hide from traffic on Bottom Road. He squared the headlamp on his forehead. He shouldered the bag. The smell of her thawing body gagged him. The weight of her buckled his legs. As he hauled her up the road, the rain made him blink, washed sweat into his eyes, fractured his headlamp beam. He stumbled into smears and starbursts of light, tripped upon closed-eye patches of black. But at last he found the place where the road shanked around a jut of sandstone and began to climb out of the canyon. From here, the cave was down a steep ravine across the creek.
* * *
Later, inside the cave, he could not remember exactly how he made it there. Shaking with cold, his back cramping, wet to his armpits, he was bleeding somewhere. On the wade across, the bag had taken on water, doubled its weight. Midstream, a heavy branch gliding at deceptive speed had spun at the last moment and mauled him, snagged the bag handle, swung him around, and nearly pulled her away.
But here he was. As he staggered into the cave mouth, his headlamp fell on beer cans and campfire remains. Bottle caps and flip-tops and cigarette butts lay everywhere under shoe prints on the grainy limestone floor. He saw old high-water marks on the layered walls. He hadn’t thought of that. The creek had come inside the cave before. But not this time. Please not this time.
Angus raised his chin and panned the headlamp through his own steaming breath. The cave walls were knobby and pocked, laminated eons of sea bottom shot with fissures and defaced with human testimony. His beam lit a cock and balls etched by knifepoint into the soft stone. From there he panned it over names and initials, boasts, oaths, and threats, ugly words for girls, cartoon pictures of their body parts. Here was C.P fucks. Here was Durrell Sherry blows donkies. Here were tally marks. Here was Hollow Billy Lives Here, Get Out.
He sloughed the bag to the cave floor. Deeper in, here was one shoe, here was a deflated vinyl air mattress with spent condoms strewn around it, here was a decomposing blue sweatshirt. He tucked his chin to see beneath the lowering roof, saw a fissure too small to crawl through. He aimed his light. Upon the powdery floor of a low-ceilinged second room his beam lit older signs of human habitation. Animal bones. Broken clay pots. A ring of fire stones. He raised the beam. Here were drawings in charcoal on pale-orange walls. Stick figures. Snakes and birds. A hunter with a bow. A bear with a spear through it. Human handprints, etched in ash.
He returned to the bag. Gently he unpacked her and laid her on the deflated mattress. He arranged the jerseys over her: Strunk, Ossie, Clausen, Gibbs. He undid the blue clip from her hair and slipped it into his pocket. He kicked through garbage around the cave rim—rotted clothing, liquor bottles, skeins of tinted plastic that had been sacks—until he found what he was looking for. Crumbling coil in the dust, diamond pattern faded, fork broken off its white tab tongue, rattle eroded to a pale shapeless sponge, here was the toy rubber rattlesnake, the unofficial team mascot for the guys whose jerseys he had stolen. They called him “Buster H. Johnson.” Younger girls who wanted it badly enough, who wanted to run with the Gibbs and Clausen crowd, had to find the cave and pose with Buster H. Johnson across their naked chests for “ID” photographs, proof they’d been here—that they were worthy and loyal and ready to be treated like sluts. The H. was for hymen. They were Cave Girls now.
Angus left the cave with the blue butterfly clip and the toy rubber snake. His next move had to involve Harley Kick, who would tell his wife where the snake came from.
41
The rain falling steadily through darkness feels good at first, warm but cooling, because Pepper’s skin burns where the troll ripped the tape off her face and wrists and ankles. But now there comes a moment where suddenly she is cold and there is no way that she can stop herself from getting colder. Her skin tightens and shrinks. She shivers and her teeth chatter.
She always thinks Marie was the lucky one . . . because Marie was older, so she never needed Bennie . . . and then when Bennie . . .
Don’t make things up to get atte
ntion . . .
It starts again and Pepper screams against it. Then ferociously she blasts the wet brush and trees around her with a chorus of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” She sings Felton Henry off her naked body, and there goes his truck, just the way she planned it, down the hill, off the bluff, sinking into the river. Ha!
But the shivers have her now, they control her. First the rain felt good but now it feels cold and she can’t stop it, can’t escape it. The troll has driven her half an hour into rainy dusk. He has stopped finally, puttered beneath an umbrella along the roadside for what seems like a long time. He has tied a pink plastic ribbon to the low-hanging branch of a tree. He has removed her from the van and walked her on a chain into the forest. There he has left her.
The handcuffs go to a chain. The chain goes to a tree. The rain feels good at first then feels cold and now she tries as much as she knows how not to feel anything at all.
42
“We observed Mr. Hill dropping off the girl at the Indian Bay Resort,” the Wisconsin Dells chief of police began by telling his visitors from the Bad Axe.
“One officer followed his van while another raided the room. The girl was already doing business, going down on some old man from Chicago who could have been her grandpa.” He paused for a grimace. “Bad choice of words. Sorry. That’s who’s on his way to get her, her grandfather, from a place called Blackhawk Locks.”
Chief Jordan Johannsen was a polished young guy like Olaf the Handsome, not quite as camera ready, but comparably muscle bound and mustachioed. He observed her sympathetically.
“I know the look, Sheriff. We’ve got coffee and some leftover pizza in the break room. You want some?”
“Only if you also serve shots of Pepto Bismol.”
He opened a drawer and set a bottle of the pink stuff on his desk. While she dosed herself, then declined pizza and accepted a cup of coffee—Yttri did the opposite—Chief Johannsen told them that their suspect had already been Mirandized for pandering and sexual assault of a minor, both of which he had denied.
“The girl’s name is Bailey Voss. His name is Dale Hill. Mr. Hill tells me Miss Voss approached him at a gas station here in town and asked him for a ride to the Indian Bay.”
“Sure. And she swore she was eighteen too.”
“Right. As for her story, Miss Voss says that Mr. Hill approached her at a party over in Bad Axe County. He said he’d take care of everything for her, and here she is.”
The sheriff cuffed her sleeve across her lips, erasing any pink.
“Let’s go talk to Mr. Hill.”
Chief Johannsen motioned for her and then Yttri to precede him. The hallway of Dells PD was spotlessly quaint, like an old elementary school. In its narrowness she felt oversize, and with coffee and Pepto in her stomach the illusion made her dizzy. Yttri almost walked into her. His touch just grazed her shoulder.
“Take a right,” Chief Johannsen said from behind, “through that door.”
Dale Hill slumped in a chair behind two-way glass in an interrogation room. Her pulse flared at the sight. He mimicked a man: blazer with the sleeves shoved up, shaved head and earring, high-top baller shoes, big ring on his pinkie finger, eyes sunk so deep that he saw the world through tubes of sickly shadow.
“He doesn’t think he needs an attorney. He’s his own lawyer, he says.”
“Of course he is.”
“He doesn’t know that Miss Voss also gave us a room number at a different Dells establishment, the Pine Cone Motel, where two other girls admitted to selling sex for him.”
Johannsen handed the sheriff a burner phone sealed in a plastic bag.
“On top of that, the old gentleman she was servicing led us to an ad on Backpage.com, where somebody with this phone number is offering the sexual services of underage girls.”
She stared at Hill feigning nonchalance in the chair beyond the glass. She stared and she burned and then she erupted. She unsnapped her service Ruger and kicked the door open and fired, fired, fired again, pounded his zombie brains against the back wall. The vision was so raw it left her disoriented, her right hand crushed in a fist.
“You OK, Sheriff?” said Olaf the Handsome.
“Fine.”
Chief Johannsen sighed and ran a thick hand over his haircut.
“Sheriff, the truth is, we could go through this routine every day of the week, especially in tourist season. A girl from your area is rare—you know, people call Milwaukee the Harvard of sex trafficking—but young ladies like Bailey Voss, they just flow through here.”
Her brain still fizzed with the image of Dale Hill’s skull exploding. Yttri was watching her. She could barely hear Johannsen.
“The internet just makes it too easy for these guys.”
Chief Johannsen had paused with his hand on the door latch to the interrogation room, about to lead her in. Detecting the forthcoming action, Hill had posed himself, chin up, arms across his chest.
“Actually,” the Dells police chief continued, “the web makes it easier for the women too. They don’t have to hang out on street corners. And they can freestyle it. They can go solo, skip the pimp, work right out of their homes or apartments, the public library, a coffee shop, wherever. They can do internet porn and never touch anybody. Pimps are losing control, but the ones remaining have gotten more extreme.”
He looked at her, his hand still on the door latch. “That’s what Miss Voss told us about the other girl. She was too hard to control, according to Hill, so he went online and sold her up the food chain.”
That startled Sheriff Kick back to attention.
“The other girl didn’t come back to the Dells with him?”
“Miss Voss says Hill left the other girl there. We found eight hundred bucks in his van, rolled up in a soda cup from a Pronto station. Probably what he sold her for, and probably the reason he was in your area in the first place, to meet his buyer. Like I said, if the pattern holds, if she was too much for him to handle, then he sold her up the food chain . . .”
Her stomach churned. “ ‘Sold her up the food chain’?”
Chief Johannsen nodded.
“The way Miss Voss describes it, you’re dealing with a whole network over in the coulee counties of folks doing drugs, making drugs, selling sex, making porn, robbing cars and houses and farms, fencing stolen goods. Miss Voss seems to know all about it.”
“Let’s see what Mr. Hill has to say,” she said.
* * *
She glared back into the sneer of this monster who had used a computer, operating from distance, at the speed of light, to feed a juvenile “up the food chain” to a bigger monster in her own backyard.
“The old gentleman you assaulted in my library might die, Mr. Hill. If I were you, I’d save myself now. Tell me where she is.”
“Who is?”
“The girl you took to the party.”
“Some chick asked me for a ride, that’s all.”
“Fine. You only gave her a ride. And she was eighteen, for sure.” She felt Yttri and Johannsen exchange glances. “Where is she?”
He smirked and shook his pink shit-balloon of a head. She felt out of breath as she continued. “Mr. Hill, you don’t understand. I’ve got you for aggravated assault. That becomes homicide if my librarian dies. Chief Johannsen has you for pandering minors. That’s a felony sex crime. Take a minute. Ask your lawyer what he thinks. Should you tell us where the girl is?” She couldn’t stop herself. “Ask Counselor Dumbfuck.”
Again she felt Yttri and Johannsen exchange looks.
“You give us her name and you tell us who she went with”—she pointed across the room—“and that door opens. You’re good to go.”
Now she felt Johannsen leaning, peering at her, felt Yttri practically jumping out of his skin. She doubled down. “You talk, you walk, asshole. Give us the girl, you’re out of here.”
“Well, then—”
“Hold on, Sheriff—”
Chief Johannsen had opened the door, but no
t for Hill, for her. He scowled. Yttri had his hands up and open, as if trying to stop some large invisible object from bouncing around the interrogation room. Johannsen said, “Sheriff, shall we?”
In the corridor against the polished bricks her voice sounded clipped and hollow.
“Shall we what?”
He offered her a paper cup of water from a cooler. She pushed it away. Johannsen said, “It’s not up to you to clear my charges . . . for one thing.”
“‘Sold her up the food chain.’ Did you hear yourself? We need to find this girl, and we need to find her now. An hour from now, I plan to be back in the Bad Axe looking for her. Do you understand?”
Johannsen looked bewildered. “What I understand, and I’m sorry, is that you’re new to this—” Here it came. “And I understand that this is emotional, but . . .”
She threw her sore arm toward the two-way glass, actually seeking the bolt of pain, the memory of Brock Pabst hitting her with a bat. “Do you see a lawyer in there?”
“Heidi—”
She wheeled on Yttri. “Don’t fucking Heidi me.”
“I don’t see a lawyer, no,” Chief Johannsen admitted. “There is no lawyer in there. Just the one in his imagination.”
“Right. Then, are you recording us?”
“No. I mean, if you want me to do that, I can do that, but—”
“I’m lying!” she seethed. “Do you understand that? Do you understand that he’s dumb enough to think that I’m dumb enough to mean what I’m saying? Do you understand that he despises women, can’t imagine one who might be smarter than he is? Or are you with him?”
Johannsen winced. Yttri stammered, “Let’s . . . let’s calm down.”
“Emotional?” She bore down Johannsen. “Is that what you call it when a woman busts balls? Is that what you call it when a woman steps in and moves the goddamn furniture?”
“I didn’t mean—”
Bad Axe County Page 19