by Glenn Trust
As the alert faded, he pulled into a gap between two northbound trucks in the right lane. Instinctively, he became inconspicuous, blending in and becoming a moving particle in the stream of moving particles; vehicles rolling up the interstate. Camouflaged amongst the herd, he was anonymous, and anonymity made him safe. He had no idea if anyone was looking for him or who might be hunting him, but blending in was a natural instinct.
Predator or prey, he adapted according to his needs. It all happened with no conscious thought on his part.
After a few miles, he relaxed. The adrenaline rush from the possible danger gave him an almost narcotic high. A sense of well-being overtook him completely. It was an almost sexual release. He lived for these moments. It was all part of the runaround. The game. The hunt. The kill. The escape. All of it. He savored it.
The steamy miles up the Georgia coast passed as his mind slipped into a dream-like reverie. Like the drowsy sleep of the lion basking in the sun after a kill, he soaked in the sun’s rays. The others on the highway with him were herd animals, unaware of his presence, and silently unaware of the danger nearby. They moved quietly around him, the killer, the predator. After the danger passed and one of their own was torn apart by the terrible fangs, they breathed a sigh of uneasy relief. It hadn’t been them, and that was good.
Warm air blew in from the open window. Lylee puffed a cigarette contentedly, a glow of satisfaction radiating from him.
The smoke from the generic “no-name” cigarette that he always bought from different convenience stores whisked out the window so that the car would not smell of it. He wouldn’t want to inhibit some health conscious, young lady from joining him for a ride. Another small detail.
The close call that morning with the young blond and the two truckers who had surprised him with their arrival was careless. Stupid, he told himself. No excuse. He would have to be more careful; get his head back in the game. The thrill of the night’s kill had still been with him. Intoxicated by it, his judgment had lagged. He knew the danger from past runarounds.
Sometimes the bloodlust overcame all reason, not that anything he was doing was in anyway reasonable to a normal person. But for him, that lust for blood had a way of controlling his actions in the way that alcohol controls a drunkard or drugs an addict. The taste of the kill created the need for more. If there was not a sufficient cooling down period after the kill, the animal in him would go on killing, and the risk of detection from his recklessness would rise accordingly. He was aware of this and tried to guard against it by giving himself a cooling down period before seeking the next kill.
It had been too soon with the girl at the gas station that morning. The rush from the kill had still roared drunkenly through him. Kills, he reminded himself. First the old man at the church, an unexpected but welcome appetizer, and then the girl, the main course. If the truckers had not arrived, the blond might be seated next to him in the old Chevy at this moment. He smiled at that thought.
The I-95 traffic was mostly trucks with a few cars interspersed. He liked running with the trucks. They knew what they were doing, usually. They knew how to go fast and how to avoid the police. The old Chevy looked run-down with its faded red and primer gray paint job, but it was in good driving shape. He was careful to keep it that way. Car trouble with a load in the trunk to dispose of, or with one of his projects sitting beside him in the front seat, could be more than a bit inconvenient. It could mean survival. Never get careless. Never get caught.
Sometimes it came down to pure luck. At times in the past when his judgment had been overpowered by the blood, his survival had depended on luck. He had always been lucky, if not in birth and family, then in deceiving others about his true persona and in his ability to escape danger. He believed himself to be a predator at the top of the food chain and knew that successful predators must be skilled in the stalk, powerful in the kill, and cunning in the escape. When cunning failed, they had to be lucky.
Sometimes, as on this runaround, he got lucky in finding his prey. He had run across the young girl within a day after his arrival in Florida.
He had driven straight through from Texas. He never conducted a runaround near home. They were always in another state and at least two states away from home. Staying on the wonderful interstate highway system that Dwight Eisenhower had given to the country, his Texas plates did not draw much attention and he could roam freely.
Taking I-10 across the Florida panhandle, he had ended up at the Atlantic Ocean. A few brief hours in a cheap hotel near Jacksonville, and the runaround had officially begun. Thinking back twenty-four hours, it surprised him how quickly he had found the girl. Some runarounds it took days to find the right situation, the right prey. His early success meant that there might well be another opportunity before he had to return to Texas.
Here on the interstate, in the bright light of day, the memory of the previous night’s encounter caused a smile to twitch across his narrow face. The eyes of the girl, terrified, then hopeless, then fading into a blank nothingness, danced in his mind.
A pleasant shiver ran through him. There would be another. He would make sure of it.
Lighting another cigarette, his eyes followed the smoke whisping out the window. Gray eyes gazed across the landscape. The stretch of highway between the small towns dotting the Georgia coast appeared barren. The green coastal plains looked empty, but he knew better. There was prey out there. He would find it. It was his runaround. This was his time.
33. “Son of a bitch and Goddammit”
Tom Ridley stopped in the bare dirt of his yard and put his foot up on the bumper of his truck to tie the lace of a dusty, scuffed boot. He leaned back, hands on his hips stretching his back in a long arch then gave out a long burp. Margaret’s breakfast of ham, eggs, grits and biscuits with gravy sat heavily, but pleasantly in his gut.
Climbing into the truck, he cranked it up to drive the two miles to the Holsen’s chicken barns for a day of cleaning up dead chickens and shoveling chicken shit. Most people complained of the chicken shit in their lives. For him, chicken shit was his life. It was a recurring joke and one he didn’t mind. He liked his life. He and Margaret had simple needs and enjoyed the quiet of life in the Georgia backcountry.
The bare siding planks of their wood frame house were gray and weathered in the morning sun, not as pretty as in the glow of the sunrise. He didn’t mind though. The bareness now made him appreciate the sunrise even more. It was all part of the cycle of things, the rosy, early morning glow, a shadowless noon sun, and the fiery orange glow over the pines when the sunset came. It was all just fine with him.
Giving a last glance at the old house in the rear view mirror, he pulled from the yard onto the dirt road. Margaret walked out onto the porch as he left in a small cloud of dust and gave him a wave. He raised his hand in the mirror and headed down the road. He did not go far.
Tom Ridley drove slowly. The engine sounds and spinning tires earlier in the predawn dark came to mind, and he thought he might see something to identify who had been on his road in the night. He did see something.
A couple of hundred feet down the road, there were tire tracks that showed where the dirt had been dug up by a turning front tire as the driver had turned and backed and turned again in the soft dirt on the shoulder trying to reverse direction on the narrow road.
Glancing off to his left, he saw something that pissed him off. Dammit. It hadn’t been George Mackey after all. Trash dumping along the dirt road had become a problem, and someone had done it again while he stood peeing in his yard that morning.
There was a pile of something in the brush about ten feet off the road. “Sonsabitches,” he muttered. Dumping their garbage right here on his road. Ridley stopped his truck and walked into ankle high grass on the side of the road to retrieve the trash and toss it into the truck.
“Sonsabitches”, he said again, for emphasis.
He could see that the grass was still bent down where someone had walked carrying their
damned garbage into the weeds. When he got to it, he saw that it was a blanket. Some kind of beige looking bed cover, like the one he and his wife had on their bed. He was going to pick it up and throw it in the back of the truck, but thought better. No telling what they dumped, and there could be a snake hiding under there. Good place for a snake. Snakes were overly common around here, and no one liked them. Tom was no exception. He lifted the edge of the blanket with the toe of his boot then quickly pulled his foot away.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, kneeling down, letting the words come singly and distinctly this time.
Gently, he lifted the blanket again. It was loosely wrapped around the bundle, but he had seen…something. Suspecting what it was, Tom, squatting beside the bundle, couldn’t help falling back into the weeds and grass as he reflexively backed away.
Recovering himself, he lifted the bed covering slowly once more. A ghostly, pale foot with red painted toenails was visible. Beyond the foot could be seen the rest of a girl’s body. She was nude with bruises around her head and neck. The ones around her neck were deep purple with darker pinprick spots in them. Tom Ridley was no sheriff’s deputy, but he knew enough to know that the girl had been strangled. He was not a timid man and life on a farm had accustomed him to blood and dead things. Death was part of life…but this. This was different.
Damn! Moving quickly, he let the blanket fall and ran to the truck. Backing at full speed, kicking up dirt and rocks, he made the couple of hundred feet back to his house in a few seconds. When he got there, his wife was on the porch, she’d heard the truck racing down the road.
“Tom, what is it?” she said as he rushed into the house. “Tom!”
He ran to the old red dial phone hanging on the wall and grabbed the receiver off the hook.
“Son of a bitch,” was all he could say. “Son of a bitch and Goddammit.”
34. Crime Wave
“So what the hell’s going on in my county?” Sheriff Richard Klineman looked around the small circular table in his office at the two men and lone woman seated with him.
“We were hoping you might shed some light on that for us Sheriff.” Bob Shaklee was calm. The GBI frequently dealt with local law enforcement officials, each with their own issues. Sheriffs were particularly noted for their agendas, and with all of them, the number one agenda item was reelection.
Shaklee’s partner, Sharon Price, amplified Shaklee’s curt response to the sheriff’s bluster. “This is pretty unusual for Pickham County Sheriff. A murder like this might have local implications, you might say. It’s possible that you and your people might have better insight into that than we would.”
“What do you mean? Local implications? What are you saying…the Klan? Is that what you think?” The sheriff’s face was red. “The Klan in Pickham County? Ridiculous, at least nowadays.”
“We don’t think anything. We’re just asking, for the record. Black man brutally murdered outside a black A.M.E. Church. The question has to be asked.”
Klineman turned his head incredulously towards the fourth person at the table, Chief Deputy Ronnie Kupman. He knew that Kupman was not necessarily his ally in any confrontation. In fact, he was only appointed the Chief Deputy in order to avoid a mutiny from the rest of the department. They revered him for his courage and forthrightness during a career spanning over thirty years. But ally or not, the sheriff knew that Kupman was an honest man and would respond truthfully to such a ridiculous question. Kupman returned the Sheriff’s gaze knowing that the Sheriff was waiting for him to speak to the situation. He sat quietly for a moment, appearing to be considering the possibility of Klan involvement, which made Klineman even more agitated. Finally he spoke.
“I would say,” he began deliberately, “that Klan involvement is very unlikely. That’s not to say that there might not be a few old throwbacks still living in the last century. But we would know about their activities. Pickham has a pretty small population and something like that would be hard to keep quiet.”
Klineman turned back towards the two GBI investigators with a look of vindication on his face. The GBI knew, of course, that Klan involvement was a very remote possibility. They, along with the FBI and a number of other agencies from other states worked very hard to track the activities of all terrorist organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan was still ranked near the top of the list of organizations under scrutiny, even in the age of Homeland Security, and the threat of terrorism from offshore.
It would have been difficult indeed for a cell to be operating in Pickham County without their knowledge. As Price had pointed out, the question had to be asked because of the circumstances. Judging by his red-faced indignation, the only one at the table who wasn’t really sure of the answer was the sheriff.
“Okay,” Shaklee continued quietly. “Klan involvement is unlikely.”
“Nonexistent,” Klineman interrupted abruptly.
“We’ll go with extremely unlikely,” Shaklee said and continued before the sheriff could interrupt again. “So here in Pickham County, we have a real whodunit murder. I assume you want us to handle the lead in the investigation Sheriff?”
“Of course. Not that our boys can’t do it…”
“No need to explain. We don’t claim turf Sheriff. Your deputies are well trained and professional; we know that. The GBI has access to resources that many local jurisdictions lack, along with a certain expertise in these matters. Happy to support your department with the additional resources available to us.” He paused to allow the sheriff an opportunity to comment on the expertise of his deputies. Klineman merely shifted uncomfortably in his seat staring at his hands clasped together on the table surface. Shaklee continued, “Happy to do it, and of course, your department can take as much of the credit as you like. Let’s just solve the murder.”
“That’s what I need…we need. The citizens of Pickham County should know that we are diligently pursuing the investigation in this tragic murder of an innocent black man. I want all of the additional resources you can gather set loose on this case. And I would appreciate no further mention of the Klan.”
Klineman made no mention that the citizens needed to know about their diligent investigation because next year was an election year. He didn’t have to.
Shaklee couldn’t help the small smile that flitted across his face. It always came down to that. Like many Georgia counties, Pickham had a significant black voting population. It was bad enough for the Sheriff that an elderly black man had been murdered, but if it was discovered that there had been Klan involvement or even rumored, Richard Klineman would be a one term sheriff.
Seeing the smile, Klineman turned to his Chief Deputy for support. “Right, Chief Deputy?”
Kupman took his time responding as usual to the sheriff’s question and did so with his usual neutral, objectivity, merely stating the facts. “We must solve this murder, right.”
Klineman stared at him as if he were from Mars. The two GBI agents were barely able to contain their laughter.
A beeping tone sounded on the desk phone. The Sheriff reached for it and a moment later, his face blanched. “What? Repeat that.” Turning the phone to the side, he motioned at Kupman. “Turn your radio on.”
Seeing the look on the sheriff’s face, Kupman was already moving his hand to the radio on his belt. They heard the call being repeated to county and state trooper units in the area.
“…body of a white female on Ridley Road, half a mile off of Mason Road. Units responding advise.”
The two day shift sheriff’s units working immediately cleared on the call followed by a bevy of troopers from fifty miles around.
Chief Deputy Kupman was out the door running through the building to the lot where his county unit was parked. The two GBI agents were right behind.
Sheriff Klineman grabbed his sport jacket off the hook on the back of his office door and stumbled hurriedly through the outer office, checking his belt to make sure he was wearing a sidearm and shouting apoplectically, at no one in
particular. “Do we have a fucking crime wave going on in this county? Someone tell me what the fuck is going on!”
The office staff clerks, secretaries, and jailers, mostly born-again Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals, outwardly professed shock at the sheriff’s sudden and uncharacteristic blasphemy. Inwardly, they were laughing their asses off.
35. Awakening George
The insect buzz-humming in his ear was incessant and maddening. It seemed to fill his head from the inside out. He ignored it for a while, or tried to, but the insect was persistent, fading away in the distance for a moment and then swooping close around his head. The swooping hum grew louder and more annoying until it pried him from the beer-induced sleep he had sunk into after leaving the house porch.
He forced his eyes open, or at least one squinting eye. Even in the dim, heavily draped room, the morning light was too strong. Brow furrowed, he squinted harder and tried opening the other eye. It seemed that he could feel the iris cranking slowly shut around the pupil to keep the painful light out. Shit.
Lying on his back, slowly gaining consciousness, George stared through slitted lids at the spotted ceiling. He put his arm over his face and waited for the pain to subside. The insect suddenly shouted at him. He reached over and swatted the cell phone vibrating loudly on the nightstand.
Below his apartment window a crazed maniac shouted, "Get the hell outta the way. I'll run your scrawny ass over!"
Felton Tobin accelerated the riding mower, bellowing at one of the scrawny, feral cats that hung around his yard. Old Fel hated the cats, but tolerated their existence, as they were adept at hunting the field mice and other varmints that found their way into his yard from the surrounding fields and woods. It was a great satisfaction for him to see one of the cats stalking some unseen prey in the mixture of grass and weeds that made up his yard. Even better, if there was some struggling little creature hanging from the feline's mouth as it trotted across the yard, he'd give a whoop.