Herman look ’bout to blow a gasket. He raise his hand.
“Yes, Herman?”
“The science people can tell when the material is burned together or separate. One of Susan’s friends works with the evidence and is right out of science school. Reaaally sharp kid. He told Susan and Susan told Lucy.”
“What you got that puts Abraham Church mixed up in the accident?”
“The car didn’t have any reason to burn. It had accelerant inside, but there was no accident. It was in a ditch.”
“It was more like a cliff.”
Stomach kinda in a knot. I see Tat’s red Mustang ass up and smokin’. Coincidence put it in that precise moment in space and time so I can make sense of this accident with Gloria and her girlfriends.
The same exact thing.
“Okay, it was steep and deeper than the car was long. But not much, and not so steep the car should have blown up.”
Herman raise his hand again.
“Herman?”
“That doesn’t happen in real life.”
“Thank you, Herman,” says Lucy. “But that doesn’t say why it has to be Abraham Church. The accident happened but it could be anybody, right? So, I looked up who was in charge of the crime scene at the police station. Guess who?”
“How could he know? Don’t make him guess.”
I say, “Some kin of Abraham Church.”
“That’s right. Mark DeChurch.”
“Ah, see his lightbulb going off?” Herman say.
Says I, “Earlier you said Abraham was Chester too.”
“Mark is his nephew. My friend Susan works in records. When I saw the article about the body business, I told her, and she did a search and found all of Abraham Church’s businesses. He has the funeral home and the garage shop.”
“That’s your tie to Frank Lloyd,” Herman say. “The garage shop.”
Look at Lucy. “And?”
“But when Susan searched the system by the business by name instead of owner, you know…. Looking for body brokers like I showed her in the magazine, then she found the Vail Body Brokers, Incorporated.”
“That the real name?”
“It is. But I drove there and the sign doesn’t say the real name. It’s only a logo. There’s no real sign. And the logo just says VBB, Inc.”
Nod.
“Are you ready for this?” she say. “Abraham Church owns the funeral home. He bought it a couple years ago. Before that, he bought businesses under his first name, his real name.”
Alla sudden the name Chester A. DeChurch come back to me from afore, like I heard it days ago not minutes. Too much time spent with no likker in me. Can’t recall shit.
“His real name,” Lucy says, “is Chester Abraham DeChurch. He never went by Chester because of all the jokes. You know, Chester the molester stuff.”
“He’s a pedophile,” Herman says. “He’s on the government registry. That’s how we connected the two names together. Not that we really needed to at that point. I mean, the man has two names in real life. You go to the house owned by Chester DeChurch and Abe Church lives there. We don’t have to connect the dots.”
“It’s the same fuckin’ dot,” says I.
“Yeah, exactly that. The same fuckin’ dot.”
Lucy look at Herman.
“Language, dear.”
Herman bounce off the duct tape chair to a desk tucked in the corner. He push the computer monitor. “Here he is. This is Abraham on the Glenwood Springs Sheriff’s department’s website, you know, the pedophiles in your neighborhood. Chester was always Abe to the people who knew him, and he grew up in Carbondale anyway. All he had to do was drop the De from his name on the business everyone sees. And no one looks at these pedo websites anyway.”
“One girl did.”
“But on the business that isn’t in the spotlight, he just kept the same old name.”
“What, he change his name legal or somethin’?”
Herman shake his head. “No. We didn’t look up the owner of the funeral home, how it’s listed. We didn’t know at the time it might be a thing, you know? A clue. We were just trying to see if there were any body brokers around here.”
“What’s this connection to Frank Lloyd and the car garage?”
“Frank works there.”
“Used to work there. I think that’s where Church found him and groomed him for the dark side. But I don’t think he actually works at the garage anymore.”
“Thank you, Herman,” says Lucy. “The connection is this. I think they planted a small explosive on the car — enough to make the girls wreck — and were right there to grab the bodies, even if they had to kill them if the accident wasn’t bad enough.”
I nod. Keep noddin’. Stop.
“Why? People die all the time.”
“No! That’s just it. I read the mortuaries. I don’t know if it’s the water — ”
“The obits. She means the obits.”
“Thank you, Herman. I don’t know if it’s the water or what, but people just aren’t dying as much as before. Plus, with regular dead people, you have family expecting bodies.”
“Can’t he just cut out a kidney and sew things back up? Put the body in a casket? Or cut out a kidney afore he run ’em through the furnace?”
“Yes, but he couldn’t sell the entire body, and that’s where the profit is.”
“If the body business was relatively new and they had contracts to fill…”
“We’re regular people,” Herman say. “We don’t know about stuff like that.”
Ants love the anthill. Some folk love the rules and is happy they got so many other people handy, tell ’em what to do. Folk can’t sleep at night ’less someone write a rule the sun got to come up. These folk see evil and think it’s someone else’s problem, right up ’til it knock on the door.
But that ain’t these people exactly.
Herman’s words stop me.
Regular folk don’t understand the mechanics of it, the tools, how bad men work evil. Almost like Herman said, so how we suppose to fight it?
No one ever taught these folks to combat evil. They taught ’em to be meek. Go to work, pay the fuckin’ tax, and go to work the next day. Keep the mouth shut.
I got a feeling Chicago Mags is lookin’ in through the window, or maybe right through the walls from the other side of the material, the nonlocal, where she say things is real. Moment feel like it got somethin’ to say but I wait and nothin’ comes.
“Are you going to kill him?”
“Thank you, Herman,” Lucy say.
“Who?”
“Abraham Church,” Herman say.
Mags is there smilin’ and the blood from her mouth is gone. All this shit goin’ on is disjointed and the brain don’t necessarily see it all or add up what it does. The ride’s been turbulent but all my life I been in a cooker. Or maybe a cure shed with the smoke and I been cured for the work the Almighty prepared for me to walk in. I been preserved to withstand the sympathy or weakness that might detour another man off the narrow path.
Regular folk can’t see the footsteps to follow, so I got to walk ’em alone.
“We’ll see. Where’s Frank Lloyd’s garage?”
Chicago Mags
Chicago Mags leans back in her wire chair. Sun’s behint the buildings. She cross her arms at her chest and shiver.
“Human beings are at the apex of the material order, but they are not the apex themselves. The universe, all the matter, all the systems and forces, every single natural and biological microsystem was designed to operate in perfect harmony to support the existence of the creator’s crowning achievement.”
“But that ain’t us,” says I.
“No. It’s something within us that we use or don’t use.”
“A riddle.”
“Free will. Everything material exists as a playground for free will. Free will is how we learn the lessons we need to learn before we return to the nonlocal. Brains are designed as learni
ng computers to process information from the environment. Brains are animal, concerned with things like heartbeat and how salty a drink is or where the lion is hiding. Brains manage the body, but their higher function is to serve as a vehicle for the consciousness that sits atop them assigning values, reacting, planning, eating, procreating, and most of all, becoming.”
“You got to quit being fertilizer, is the point.”
“No, we’ve moved on from polishing turds. I’m making the next point. To the animal, all value is assigned within the framework of whether something answers an animal need. Food is good so killing things and eating them is good. That doesn’t require thought. But consciousness is the jewel sitting in the cockpit of the animal brain. Consciousness is separate, from someplace else, an ethereal hitchhiker crossing the material world. It has the power to lurk like it doesn’t exist at all, or assert, so there appears to be nothing else. If it lurks it lowers. Asserts, it raises. When asserting, consciousness is literally the sculpture of the self-made man, hammer in one hand and chisel in the other, forming the legs that will walk him from the rubble when he is done. We are created to self-create. To finish the project. To sit atop the animal but resonate with the source, the divine. We exist to search for the underlying truth that created us.”
“What truth?”
“Love.”
“Love what?”
“Love. Like God said, I AM. The assertion is the proof. The answer doesn’t need more words. LOVE.”
“Don’t fully cognitate your meaning.”
“The material universe is a projection. Quantum physics has proven irrefutably that matter doesn’t exist in a material form until consciousness looks at it and collapses possibility into actuality. It’s like a mirror reflecting us. And just like there is a consciousness behind the eyes in your mirror, that, if you think about it, is more real than the image that houses it, there is a consciousness behind the universe that is more real than the stardust and molecules and vibrations that we call matter. That consciousness is God, and if you look, you’ll find him looking back, swept away, lost in love for you.”
“Fuck.”
“Love.”
“I can’t ken it.”
“He can, until you do.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Baer, there’s nothing else. Love. The only alternative is evil.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Drivin’ the Eldorado I recall standin’ on the roadside with Abe Church lookin’ at the Mustang accident and his surprise on seein’ the law there.
I recall the truck behind him, haulin’ horses.
The vehicle behind that was another truck with a man, two ladies and motorcycles on the trailer. I remember thinkin’ these boys had with ’em all the stuff they love to ride. Trucks, horses, motorcycles and women.
That third truck was Frank Lloyd and the girls in it was Bambi and Bunny. Bet W’s left nut.
I take a long simmerin’ gurgle from the Turkey. Tool past the place where the car maintenance and monkeyshop’s suppose to be. Got the windows down, seat way back and ass low like the cool kids but I grumble by the McDonalds and don’t turn.
I just keep toolin’.
The garage ain’t for cars, it’s for motorcycles. Got ten out front for sale. Dirt bikes, a couple baggers, a tour bike and the rest is rockets.
After a half mile of noodling the implications of Frankie Black Boots Lloyd bein’ a motorcycle man the traffic’s thin and I swing a U-turn. Next pass I go slow so I can make out the particulars. It’s a gray-painted cinderblock building with a giant bay door on the left and picture windows wrapped around the right corner; glass ain’t seen a washcloth in years. Little sign says State Inspections and behind the windows the inside is half dark, like they don’t bother with the lights on that side. I pull over and watch the goin’s-on.
Not a damn thing goin’ on.
I bet he’s behind the garage door.
“Right. And assumin’ he’s a shithead, for argument’s sake…”
He’s up to no good.
I think on all the work still needs done to set the world back on its axis. I got to go back to Chicago and find the pair on the motorcycle that shot Mags.
I got to rectify a little situation with Frank Lloyd.
Maybe put a hurt on them stupid ass girls he work with — Bambi and Bunny — though I’ll confess the logic need a few stones added to the foundation. Frank Lloyd intend to put a hurt on me, but them girls in the simplest view only wanted to get me horned up.
I might give ’em a good ass chewin’.
But the biggest mystery is what the motel woman Lucy say, how Abraham Church was at the Lodge laundry room after Frank beat me with the ball bat. Her words don’t reconcile with all I know ’bout Church and I got the paradox to work out. Abe Church see the lies — he said as much, and I got no juice nor red out him. He’s a straight shooter and hates the untruth like me.
But…
In the hospital Church say some good Samaritan brung me in…. But I also got Lucy sayin’ Church was at the laundry room when Lloyd was there, and she say Church haul me to the hospital in his truck. She wasn’t shootin’ sparks neither.
Only way to reconcile the two is if Church was the Samaritan but didn’t feel the need to say so. Strictly speaking that ain’t lyin’.
It ain’t shootin’ straight neither.
Last, Lucy said Church is a kid fucker. Showed me his picture on the website.
I ain’t ready yet, but know I got to admit I gauge the man wrong entirely.
A man wearin’ leather swings fast into the lot on a black Victory with no exhaust. Sounds like a pair of cannon mounted to a skateboard. Got a ponytail and he don’t wear a helmet so the sunlight glitters off the earrings in his eyebrows real pretty. Bone-skinny and covered in tattoos, all in black ink. Dismounted, he raps the garage door with the side of his fist and after a minute the door lifts six inches and no more. He looks around. Glance right past the gold Eldorado ’cross the street. Adjusts his mess and from the look of the bulge he’s hung like a light switch. He stoops and lifts the bay door and I wonder on that, how Frankie Lloyd do business… make a customer open the garage door.
Must be his kid.
“I was thinkin’ that too, Joe.”
With the door open a minute I see in the bay. They’s a couple bikes on lifts with no one turnin’ wrenches and looks like Frankie’s on the side workin’ some fabrication machine.
Light Switch parks his bike inside and while he pull the chains to close the door, Frank comes up from the back wearin’ a onesie with oil and grease all over.
There he is, the fella try to rob me with the sluts then try to bust my skull with a bat. This is the famous two step operation: Kill him, then ask questions.
“I’m yankin’ your chain, Stinky Joe. I’ll ask the questions first.”
Maybe you should wait a minute and see how the liquor’s going to hit you.
“Likker don’t hit me. It’s more akin a kiss.”
While I got nothin’ to do but watch and wait I cognitate on the overall situation. Logistics and tactics. I’m willin’ to step through the front door not knowin’ what’s inside, but if I was both lucky and walkin’ a path chose by the Almighty I’d have a Abrams tank and drive right through the bay. Or a Panzer. They was nice. As is, Frank Lloyd’ll be surprised to see me, but the surprise’d be loftier if I dropped the door with a tank, is all.
Another thing… be real nice if I knew where they was inside.
Sometimes with the curse, I feel the juice through walls and even know which room holds the liar. But I never got it quite so local as to know where in the room to look. The curse ain’t like the x-ray vision.
I exit the Eldorado with Joe in the passenger seat.
“I don't know exactly what I'm gettin’ into, but you’re welcome to sit in the seat or come along and watch. I figger to ask some questions and fire some bullets.”
No, thank you.
"You
sure?"
We have to talk. This… behavior… doesn't fly. You gave your word.
I brace on the open window and study Joe inside.
"Joe, it’s time for some instruction. Speakin’ hypothetical... If you give me your solemn oath you was gonna be a man and walk on your two hind legs, and grow a couple thumbs, I'd have the sense to call bullshit. Wouldn’t be fair, me acceptin’ a promise you couldn’t keep. Wouldn’t be just, if I knew it.”
Clever.
“I don’t hold it agin ya. You ain’t at the pinnacle like me and don’t see everything as clear. But I got the crystal clarity and as such, I see I can’t be what I ain’t. Seems obvious enough. And since I’m on a mission here, and got Corazon and Mags to kill for and want to do it drunk, if you can't deal with that you need another best friend. I won't be what I'm not. Even if I could.”
Joe says naught. Reach in for an ear scratch but he turn away.
I walk from the Eldorado glad I never taught Joe to drive.
I won't kowtow to a dog. Not this day. I sit at a fire writin’ letters thirty years knowin’ I was made different and not happy with it. After all the killin’ I had to think it through, had to judge my own evil self else it wouldn’t sit with the moral sense. Had to plead sanity and call myself innocent, as every time I try to better myself, I only learn I was made right the first time. Is why every time I try to change, I go back the way I was.
Now I’m back to knowin’ what I knew: I am what I am and things is rarely what they ain’t. I’ll drink when I want and kill when I got to.
Feel a little exposed huffin’ across the lot to the garage run by the fella busted my arm and made me a short-term lefty. Keep the eyes peeled and the good hand ready to cross-draw Smith. If it wasn’t for the street traffic, I’d have Smith on point right now and maybe I oughta anyway. But I push open the door without.
Buzzer go off.
“Right with you,” comes the voice of Frank Lloyd from the bay.
Try not to sound like nobody. “Hooahh-yehp.”
The Men I Sent Forward (Baer Creighton Book 6) Page 19