by Jen Blood
Mae would neither confirm nor deny; she just asked me to come to Kentucky.
I came.
There was no one waiting for me when I landed—I’d already told Mae I’d rent a car, so she didn’t have something else to worry about while she prepared to bury the man she’d loved since grade school. Still in board shorts and sandals, I watched the natives while I waited for baggage claim to regurgitate my duffel.
A gray-haired man in Dockers and a sweater vest embraced a pretty, fair-skinned woman a head shorter and maybe a decade younger than him. They kissed, his hand at the soft slope of her neck as he pulled her closer. It wasn’t like some teenage tonsil-hockey kiss, with too much tongue and that self-conscious need the very young have to prove their virility as publicly as possible. It was more intimate than that; more electrified. The man’s arm settled naturally around her shoulders when they parted. Their heads were tipped close as they walked away, hip to hip, and I could hear her laughter and see the light in his eyes as they left the airport.
I retrieved my duffel. Despite three marriages, one of them to the very same little sister I’d taken a baseball bat to the gut for as a teenager, there was only one person I could imagine greeting me in the airport like that.
Not for the first time—or even the hundredth—I thought of Solomon. And not for the first time, or the hundredth, I pushed that thought out of my head.
As I made for the door, I felt the now-familiar weight of someone’s eyes on my back. I turned and scanned the crowd. A slow crawl of fear ran up my spine when a thin man with a receding hairline and angular features caught my eye and then ducked into the crowd before I could get a clear picture of him. He wore a black trench coat and carried an expensive leather briefcase. For a full thirty seconds of blind panic, I watched his progress in the crowd. The latest incoming flight was broadcast over the PA system. The man paused, listening. He turned once more, giving me an unobstructed view of his face.
I didn’t recognize him.
The slow crawl of fear faded, but it hardly disappeared.
Six months before, a nameless ghoul had threatened me at gunpoint while Solomon sat tied twenty feet away, a belt looped around her throat, a monster touching her in ways I was helpless to stop. That moment had changed something about my world, and the way I viewed it. More troubling, it had changed something fundamental about the way I viewed myself. Since then, I’d spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder.
True, the traveler with the trench coat and the briefcase wasn’t that nameless ghoul. That didn’t change what I knew to be true, though: He was out there somewhere. And he was watching us.
From baggage claim, I went straight to the rental place to pick up the car I’d reserved, still trying to re-acclimate to civilization. A spit-shined, fresh-faced kid of no more than twenty greeted me at the counter. His hair was cut short. His tie was perfectly centered. I hadn’t bathed in two days, hadn’t shaved for considerably longer, and it turned out that my forty-year-old bones didn’t recover from wipeouts nearly as well as they had a decade ago.
My shiny young friend didn’t look fazed, though.
“I reserved a rental,” I said. “The name’s Daniel Diggins.” I pulled out my wallet to retrieve the confirmation code I’d scrawled on a napkin.
The kid blinked at me, his smile faltering. “Uh—I’m sorry, sir…”
I frowned and pushed the napkin toward him. “They’ve already charged my card—I’ve got the confirmation number right there. I don’t care what you give me. It doesn’t have to be what I reserved.”
“Well, no, sir—we have cars. But you already picked up yours.”
I stared at him, eyebrows raised. “Then why am I here?”
“Not you,” he amended. “But your girlf—” He stopped, sensing that I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “She said you were meeting at the airport,” he insisted. “Red hair? Little thing… real pretty?” He sighed in relief, pointing toward the door. “There.”
I turned around. Erin Solomon herself pushed the door open and crossed the threshold. Her hair was cropped shorter than I’d seen it since she was in high school, her fair skin a shade paler than I remembered thanks to the long Maine winter. She wore boot-cut jeans and a striped jersey, oversized sunglasses pushed back on her head. All the air left the room.
“Hey, ace,” she said after a moment. “Need a lift?”
◊◊◊◊◊
“No,” I said the moment we were outside.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” she asked. “I just thought you could use some moral support.”
“Nope. I’m fine, thanks.” The rental—my rental, a white Ford Focus—was idling in front of the rental office. Solomon’s second-in-command, Einstein, had his fuzzy white head out the window, his whole body wagging.
“Look, I know we haven’t talked in a while—”
“Six months, actually,” I said. “We haven’t talked in six months, except for one panicked phone call in the middle of the night in September, when you’d had a bad dream and needed to hear my voice. You can’t just show up like this—”
“I wasn’t trying to piss you off,” she said, more quietly than I’d expected. “You’re right: I have no right to be here. I was trying to help. If I’d just lost someone important, you’d be there. You always have been. I was just trying to do the same.”
I didn’t say anything. She shrugged, looking awkward and miserable. “I’ll go if you really don’t want me here.”
I should have told her to do exactly that—as much for her sake as mine. It wasn’t like she didn’t deserve it. But the fact was, the idea of returning to my old Kentucky home and all the Kentucky folk I’d left behind—including an ex-wife who, last time I checked, hated my guts—in order to bury my childhood friend, was only slightly more appealing than being run down by a freight train. Twice.
And it really was good to see her.
Solomon chewed her lip. I was caught suddenly by the memory of luminescent green eyes and the feel of her body pressed to mine over the course of forty-eight hours last summer, when we were running for our lives and sleeping in one another’s arms and the only thing that mattered was survival. And her.
“You’re a pain in the ass,” I said.
“I know that. Do you want me to leave?”
I scratched my neck, digging in hard enough to feel it. Breathed deep. And took a step toward her. “You’re here. I guess you might as well stay.”
“Okay,” she said. Something sad and quiet that hadn’t been there before last summer flickered in her eyes. “I guess I might as well.”
It was cool and clear when we left the airport. The grass was green. The sky was blue. According to a local with whom I’d flown, it had been a mild winter and now, in March, spring had taken hold of Kentucky and showed no signs of letting go. I took the wheel of the rental without the aid of GPS or Rand-McNally and kept my foot heavy on the accelerator, rediscovering the Bluegrass State like the half-forgotten lyric of a once-favorite song.
Once we hit I-64, I glanced at Solomon when she wasn’t paying attention, searching for signs that she’d fallen apart without me. There were none. There was, however, a thin scar running along the side of her right wrist, another remnant from our forty-eight hours of hell in August. She caught me looking and covered the scar with her left hand uncomfortably.
“How’s the wrist?” I asked.
“Better,” she said. “More or less. I just had another surgery about a month ago.”
“And that makes…?”
“Three.”
Three surgeries. Six months since we’d seen each other last. Another memory flashed through my mind: Solomon ripping off the splint I’d made and pulling herself out of our cave prison to safety; shouting down to me as I bled on the ground below. I’m not leaving you.
I sighed. It sounded wearier than it should have, considering I’d just gotten back from two months of hanging out on the beach. We fell back into silence.
“So, what did Mae tell you?” she finally asked.
I frowned. I still hadn’t wrapped my head around the information I’d gotten so far on that count. “It’s a little bizarre,” I said.
“There’s an understatement. Did she give you details?”
“Wyatt disappeared on March second—a Saturday night,” I said, reciting the scant facts I’d been given. “His truck was still at the site of his last appointment, but there was no sign of him. He was found on the side of the highway late Wednesday night with an injection mark in his neck and no other sign of physical trauma, wearing a suit Mae had never seen before. And no shoes.”
“That’s what I got, too,” she said. “It’s weird. And someone like Wyatt… I mean, who didn’t like the guy? He was a country vet. James Herriot in a cowboy hat. Who murders James Herriot?”
“Apparently, someone.”
We fell silent again. I realized after a few minutes that I wasn’t the only one sneaking sideways glances. I caught her eventually and quirked an eyebrow.
“What?” I asked.
“You look good.”
“The last time you saw me, we’d just spent two days running for our lives with a madman on our heels. It’s not hard to look good when that’s your yardstick.” I paused. “You sound surprised.”
“No… not exactly.” I waited patiently, eyes on the road, while she sorted through what she wanted to say. “Actually, I wasn’t sure what I’d find when your plane landed,” she conceded.
Between the ages of ten and eighteen, Solomon spent most of her free time cleaning up after her mother—who was a stellar surgeon by day, and the town drunk by night. Then she followed that up with a nice little stint looking after me in her twenties, before I got clean four years ago. Old habits die hard.
“Ah,” I said. “So there’s the real reason you showed up today: still playing designated driver after all these years.”
“You quit your day job, dumped your girlfriend, and took off for Costa Rica with a bunch of extras from The Endless Summer. Is it really so crazy for me to think you’d be doing lines off some beach bunny’s backside?”
I laughed out loud. “Jesus, Solomon. It was a surf trip, not spring break. I was with a bunch of forty-year-old guys—hell, half of them had their wives and kids with them. Someday, I’m taking you on one of these trips. Your perception of the lifestyle is just bizarre.”
She didn’t say anything to that. Translation: Solomon wasn’t free to think about surf trips with me anymore.
“How’s Juarez?” I asked, taking the silence as sufficient segue. Juarez was Jack Juarez, God’s gift to the FBI. Tall and lean and vaguely Cuban. And nice, actually. The bastard.
“He’s good,” she said.
“He knows you’re here with me?”
“It was his idea.” Of course it was. “I mean—not totally his idea,” she amended. “I mentioned it. He said I should come without him.”
I looked out the window at the landscape passing by. “He’s a bigger man than I am,” I said. She turned to face me, her green eyes darkening with her mood. “Not that I’d be dumb enough to try and stop you. But if we were together, there’s no way in hell I’d suggest you head off on a road trip with some other guy.”
“He trusts me.”
I turned to look at her. Her jaw was hard, her anger plain. I smiled. “How evolved of him.”
◊◊◊◊◊
About an hour and a half from our destination, Solomon pointed out a road sign for Smithfield U. that featured two penguins in sunglasses and baseball hats.
“Why are penguins the mascot for a Kentucky college?” she asked.
“It’s Kentucky. Logic doesn’t always play a big role in things. It’s part of the charm.”
“Good to know.”
We’d just passed the campus when Solomon caught me looking in the rearview mirror. She turned around in her seat.
“Did you see someone back there?” The edge of panic in her voice was new. I knew it wasn’t unwarranted given our recent experiences, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
“No,” I lied. A dark blue sedan had been keeping pace with us since we’d left the airport. I wasn’t really concerned until I realized the car was still behind us after we hit I-69 and the Purchase Parkway. It could still be coincidence, I reasoned. Plenty of people could be making the trek from Louisville to the westernmost corner of the state on an overcast Tuesday in March.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “Me, too. I mean—seriously. What are the chances we get knocked off the road and hunted down by a crazed serial killer twice in one year?”
“Not great,” I said.
“Exactly,” she agreed. She didn’t sound convinced.
Outside, new leaves were just budding on a wall of trees that lined the road on either side: oaks and ash, maple and poplar and sycamore. I turned on the radio and tuned it to 89.9, smiling at the voice that scraped through our speakers.
“Weather today in Justice looks gray with a healthy side of rain, so stay on in and keep those toes by the fire. Crazy Jake Dooley’s here till nightfall—we got records to spin and memories to make. Now y’all turn up the noise and stay close.”
Crazy Jake faded out and Lightnin’ Hopkins faded in. Jake sounded like scorched gravel, but he had a mind for music and an endless supply of classic records that kept me entertained through three long years married to Ashley Durham.
“What was that?” Solomon asked.
“That,” I said, “was Crazy Jake Dooley. He broadcasts out of Justice, but he’s kind of a cult figure in Kentucky. If you’re going to Justice, I want to make sure you get the full experience. Jake’s part of the immersion.”
I turned up the music and refrained from checking the rearview mirror again. Solomon settled in, her feet tapping, for the rest of the journey.
It was just past one in the afternoon when we got where we were going. The sun had vanished behind a blanket of thick, menacing gray clouds, and the temperature had dropped a good fifteen degrees since Louisville. I tried not to view that as a sign of impending doom, but considering Solomon and my luck in the past, it was hard to write it off completely.
Justice is a one-streetlight town on the Mississippi that was booming up until the 1970s, when levees rerouted the river. Since then, the population has held steady at about fifteen hundred, with the bulk of those people working in neighboring towns. Visitors are greeted by a sign that reads simply JUSTICE FIRST as they cross the town line. Just beyond that was a sign that hadn’t been there when I’d left five years before, however.
“ ‘Hell is real.’ ” Solomon read the flaming orange letters aloud. “Or at least it is according to Reverend Jesup T. Barnel. Well, there you go. One theological debate ended.”
Ten feet later, a second sign appeared. “ ‘Repent all ye sinners. The fire awaits,’ ” Solomon read. Her voice was light enough, but she was doing the knee-bouncing thing that usually means she’s either nervous or she has to pee. When it’s the former, the knee-bouncing is accompanied by an endless, one-sided, rambling dialogue, which is how I knew this was anxiety and not just an overactive bladder.
After another ten feet, the largest sign of all appeared—ten feet high, maybe twelve across. On it was a picture of an overweight, elderly white man with a white beard and a cowboy hat.
“There’s a tent meeting tomorrow night,” Solomon said. “In which Reverend Barnel will purportedly ‘Set the clock ticking: forty-eight hours ‘til the End is Come.’ ” She looked at me speculatively. “Look at that—we made it just in time for Armageddon.”
“Of course we did,” I said. “This is you and me we’re talking about.”
“Good point.” She shook her head as we approached the center of town. “So, this is Justice. I can’t believe you lived here for three years. It’s not really how I imagined it.”
“What were you thinking?”
She had t
o think about that for a minute. “Kind of a cross between Dodge and that town in Footloose.”
“Actually, you’re not that far off.”
The town of Justice consists of a main stretch of boarded-up storefronts and a few diehards still managing to hang on, despite Walmart’s chokehold on the local economy: the Justice Qwik E Mart, True Value Hardware, and Martin Feed & Grain. Across the way, you’ll find the historic Justice City Hall, built in 1862, flanked on one side by the local police station, and on the other by WKRO Radio and the old Twin Cinemas movie theater.
It took five minutes to leave Justice proper behind. From there, I took River Road past churches and shacks, For Sale signs posted at every third house or so, and then turned onto a pitted dirt road shrouded by old oak trees. We trekked through a mile of mud and deep ruts until Wyatt’s house came into view. The sky darkened further as I pulled in behind a twin-cab 4x4 parked in the driveway.
Dogs barked. Einstein barked back at them. Roosters crowed. Three goats and a donkey eyed us curiously from behind wire fencing off to our right. I stopped the car, but made no move to get out.
“You all right?” Solomon asked.
It was an excellent question. I only wished I had a good answer. “Not at all. But what are you gonna do, right?”
She took my hand in hers—carefully, like she was taking hold of a live wire. Her hand was cool and dry, soft and strong. Her eyes met mine, a frown tipping the corners of her mouth. “Whatever you need, I’m here. It’s what we do, right?”
We stayed that way for a minute or more before she let go. It had gotten too warm in the car. Too close. I thought again of her body against mine.The way her lips had tasted, the words she’d whispered. Don’t let go, okay? Not until you have to.
“We should go in,” she said.
We did.
Chapter Two - Danny
The house was busting at the seams with every relative they’d ever had, and then some. Danny had never been much for family anyway, and now to have everyone here carrying on about how much they loved his daddy and what a good man Wyatt Durham had been and how he was probably setting at Jesus’s right hand right then… It just got to be too much, is all.