Bad Bones (Claire Morgan)

by Linda Ladd

  “No, no, please don’t. I hate all that fightin’ that goes on over at your place. Sometimes in the summertime, we can hear the cheering and see the car lights on Saturday nights. I don’t want you to get yourself beat up. I don’t wanna see you come home all bruised up and sore and bleeding, like you was the day I met up with you. I can’t bear to think of you getting hurt.”

  “Nah, I’m gonna be all right, I promise. But let’s just do it. Now. We gotta get our things together, tonight, and then we gotta just get outta here for good—”

  When the door was suddenly thrown open, they both jerked upright and she screamed in horror. There stood his grandfather and her father, and many of the other men who were the church elders. The men all stared down in disgust at their nakedness, their faces hard and cold and unforgiving.

  “For shame, for shame, you Jezebel. And you, my only grandson! You have ruined this poor girl that you profess to love.” Grandfather’s voice started out harsh, and then began to tremble with his burgeoning rage. “You cover yourself, girl, and get yourself home with your father. You are doin’ the devil’s handiwork out here with this sinner.”

  Punk’s true love burst into tears and quickly tried to pull her dress over her head, only to be jerked up roughly by her father and dragged out of the shack, struggling and screaming her lover’s name. Punk tried to get up and stop them, but a couple of the men grabbed him and tried to tie his hands behind his back. He struggled desperately and then fought like a demon, harder than he had ever fought in his life, landing powerful blows, knocking them down, breaking their bones, and this time without Bones coming to his rescue. Enraged, he put three of them on the floor, before one of them grabbed a piece of firewood and clubbed him senseless.

  When Punk awoke again, he was back inside his bedroom in his grandfather’s house. Rousing up, his head was thudding hard and steadily and he felt dizzy and sick to his stomach. Then he realized that his right wrist was handcuffed to the bed, and his grandfather sat in the spindle rocking chair beside the window. The old man stood up but he didn’t approach the bed. “You have greatly dishonored me and that poor innocent young girl. You will have to repent and ask God’s mercy and forgiveness.”

  “Where is she? What’d you do to her? Is she okay? You better not of hurt her, I’m warnin’ you.”

  “It doesn’t concern you where she is or what’s been done to her. She has already repented and asked forgiveness for her sins. She is being dealt with.”

  “She’s not sinful, you old bastard. She’s perfect and beautiful and she’s mine. We’re gettin’ married and you cain’t stop us. No matter what it takes, we’re gonna get married.”

  “No, you are not. Thanks to your reckless behavior, she is to be married to the man her father has chosen for her, something decided long before you came here and led her to ruin. Despite her deflowering and wanton behavior, her chosen husband has agreed to marry her.”

  “No! No! I won’t let her do that! She won’t do that to me!”

  “She will do it, and she will do it tomorrow morning at the church across the way. You may watch out your window and see that her disgrace will be corrected and forgiven by her loving family. Then you will leave this place and never come back. You will forget she exists and never try to speak to her again. I never want to see you after this day.”

  Sick at heart, horrified at what he’d been told, Punk stared at him, mute and destroyed. He felt as if he were dying inside. He could not let that wedding happen. He could not let them take her away from him, no matter what he had to do. He would kill them. That’s what he would do. He would kill them all, every single one of them, before he would let them take her away from him.

  When the morning light finally grayed the sky and dawn crept up over the trees that crowned the hills, he pulled the long chain that tethered him to the bed so that he could stand at the window and watch for her. He had already tried to get out the door but it was bolted tight from the outside. The windows were, too, and very high, with a sheer drop to the ground. He had given up hope. There was nothing else he could do. Then he saw three people walking down the deserted dirt street toward the little church. His true love and her father, and another man, a very old man with a white beard, who looked old enough to be her grandfather. She had her head down and her hands held prayerfully together. He could see the bruises on her face. He pounded on the glass, hysterical, screaming her name, but she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see him, didn’t even know he was there. Horrified that the wedding was really going to happen and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it, he pulled the chain over to the door and beat his fists on it, kicking it and screaming for them to let him out. Nothing happened. Not a sound, no one came, and he finally sank down onto the carpet in a distraught heap and wept hard and anguished tears of helplessness.

  Hours passed, and he just lay there, alone and miserable. Then the night came and went. It wasn’t until the next morning that he heard the door open, and the man who stood guard outside his door stepped inside. The older guy still had bruises on his face and a black eye from when Punk had struck him in the shack. He was holding a breakfast tray in one hand, and a sturdy wood club in the other.

  “Be calm, sonny,” he said warily. “Don’t make any sudden moves. You understand me? I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I am calm. There’s nothing more I can do. It’s over. She’s married to that old man. I saw it happen through my window.”

  “Good, good. Now you—”

  Punk darted at him so quickly that the man couldn’t react. Punk hit him hard in the left ear, and the brutal punch put the man down on his side. The tray and dishes and silverware went flying to the carpet, tinkling and breaking and clanking against the floor. The guy came back up, almost at once, club back up and ready to defend himself. But then Punk heard feet pounding up the steps. He turned to the door and saw that it was Bones! Come to help him, just like in the old days! Bones jumped on the guy from behind and tackled him to the floor, then climbed on top and held his arms down with his knees. He grabbed the club off the floor and beat the guy in the face, hitting him over and over, his facial bones crunching like the sound of a car’s wheels on gravel, until there wasn’t any face there anymore, just raw red meat and broken teeth and blood drenching everything.

  “Well, he ain’t gonna bother you no more, bro,” Bones said, panting hard from the effort of such a brutal kill. His shirt and pants were covered with blood, and he licked some of it off his skinned-up knuckles. “Tastes good, but not as good as Pa’s did. Pa’s tasted as sweet as sorghum to come out of such a bastard.” He grinned at Punk. “I got here in the nick of time, didn’t I, Punk? Just like always, huh?”

  “C’mon, Bones, help me break this chain. We gotta go get my girl and get her outta here. They made her marry this guy she didn’t even know. This old man, lots older than Pa.”

  “We’ll get him and break ’im up good, but first we gonna get that old geezer downstairs. He’s the one that started all this shit, right? We gotta kill him first.”

  “Yeah, we gotta kill my grandfather, but how did you even know all this stuff was goin’ on? How did you even know I was locked in up in this here room?”

  Bones finally broke the chain and freed Punk. “I been watchin’ and listenin’ and creepin’ around this stupid little place. Cain’t rightly see why you ever came over here. These loons are religious fanatics, cain’t you see that? I just wanted to know what you was up to over here with that silly little girl. So here I am, at your service, ready to save your ass, so you best be grateful.”

  “What’s going on up here?” came a deep voice from out in the hallway.

  Then his grandfather was standing in the doorway, his wrinkled face shocked when he saw all the blood on the floor and bed and the maimed and beaten body lying motionlessly on the carpet. Punk and Bones just stared at him for a few seconds. Then Bones was on him like a bat outta hell, knocking the old man back out into the hallway where his grandfa
ther started shouting hysterically for help. Bones took the wooden club and hit him hard in the Adam’s apple, and his yelling stopped abruptly with the terrible pop of neck bones bursting apart. Then he was sitting on his knees beside the old man’s body, slamming down the club on one bone after another and shivering all over with delight at each loud crack he heard. Punk stood there and watched, but he was pleased this time. That old guy ought to suffer and die. He shouldn’t ever have messed with Punk and his girl and their true love.

  After a time, Punk said, “Now hurry it up, Bones. He’s dead, ain’t he? Quit breakin’ him up. Let’s get his money out of that drawer in his office and get her and get the hell outta here before they ring the alarm bell.”

  Downstairs, they broke into the top desk drawer and found great bundles of green bills, all rolled up and bound with rubber bands. That was going to be a very nice nest egg for him and his true love, and Bones, too, now that he was back in the picture and had saved Punk’s ass. They found the house where her new husband had taken her captive, and they crept inside the front door and up the steps. The newlywed couple was in the master bedroom, and he was raping her. When they burst in, she screamed her head off, and the old man jumped off her, but only to meet Bones’s heavy club right in his face. He groaned and fell back on the bed, and they both started beating the hell out of him with their fists and clubs. His bones were snapping and crackling like a hot fire, just like the flames of rage burning inside them. Blood was spattering everywhere, all over them and his true love’s naked body and the bed and the walls and the floor and the ceiling. She kept pressing herself back away from the gore and violence, and screaming and screaming, shrill, horrible shrieks of shock and horror, until the brothers finally stopped and tried to catch their breath. Then Punk heard people shouting outside the house. He got up off his knees and looked around. His girl was cowering in the bed, hiding under the covers, and Bones was long gone. Then before he could think to run, too, yelling, angry men burst into the room and subdued him, and he could only stare at his blood-spattered, trembling true love peeking out from under the bloody sheets as they dragged him out of the room and away from her forevermore.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After Claire picked up her Ford Explorer at Joe McKay’s farm, thanked him, and bid him good-bye, she headed back to the office to see if Bud had made it home from Kansas City. He hadn’t. At that point, she began to wonder if he was ever going to come back. Brianna was that beautiful and had that kind of magnetic effect on Bud. Since it had started sleeting rather hard again, she sat down at her desk and fired up her computer. She first pulled up the county database, and it didn’t take her long to find a long list of Parker and Fitch rap sheets. Wow, these guys flaunted each and every law on the books, all right.

  Yes, this job was going to take her some research time, but she had plenty of that, since Bud was off enjoying himself somewhere and Black had flown back down to New Orleans for an emergency meeting with his Hotel Crescent staff while the weather supposedly held, and hopefully would not be partying it up somewhere on Bourbon Street with his old friend, Jack Holliday, and/or Black’s godfather brother. He hadn’t called in, which he usually had done by now, but that was a good thing, since she’d spent the morning with Joe McKay. He probably wouldn’t like that, even though he had suggested it himself. So maybe he didn’t need to know.

  Pouring herself a cup of extremely strong black coffee in the department’s snack room, she settled in for a long winter’s night of the Parker-Fitch hillbilly feud. It was not a good thing, not by any stretch of the imagination. The first arrests had been noted in the 1920s, believe it or not, and okay, that was hard for her to believe. Hell, the two families had tangled and their wounds had festered for almost a hundred years now. Good grief. Some people were just so ignorant and apparently bred with a slightly unforgiving bent, to boot.

  She pulled up the report on Arrest Number One, as opposed to Arrest Number Six Hundred and One. She read through it quickly. Well, it appeared the initial altercation had been fought over a woman. Surprise, surprise. Men, for pity sake. Can’t live with them and can’t keep them from beating each other to bloody pulps. From what she could ascertain, a long-ago Grand Poo-bah of the Parker tribe obviously had an itch he couldn’t scratch all wrapped up in a giant hankering for the young fiancée of the Grand Poo-bah of the Fitch idiots. They had fought over it for decades like the insane people they probably were. Parker had killed the Fitch with a bowie knife plunged straight into the heart, no less, and said fair maiden had thrown herself off a nearby cliff onto the rocks below. Shakespeare would’ve loved these people, oh, yeah. This tragedy was just made for Bard Will’s whilsts, and thous and Falstaffs and lengthy soliloquies. However, the most sought-after lady’s headfirst plunge off a cliff sounded pretty damn familiar to Claire’s current case, so maybe history was repeating itself. Maybe there was a star-crossed romance going on up in them thar hills that ended in Paulie Parker being turned into a bruised up and broken, grape-hued Popsicle stick. But if that was the case, how did ghostly-hued and avian-looking Blythe the White fit into this ugly little screenplay? And where was Blythe anyway? Had she come in to identify the body or was she still staring out that high window for her lost love and looking all pasty and forlorn?

  A quick call to Buckeye Boyd indicated that it was a big “no, ma’am” on the identifying the body question and that somebody needed to get the hell down to the morgue and claim the poor guy’s pummeled body posthaste or even faster than that. Claire told Buck that she’d look into it and tried to call Blythe Parker, but could not get an answer, so she left her number and settled back to read more of the entertaining arrest records, which included lots of fisticuffs and broken noses, mostly on the police officers sent to run them in, which didn’t bode all that well for Bud and her. It didn’t take her long to brand said families as Crazy Lunatics of the Highest Hillbilly Order. Lots of phrases came to mind: “like father, like son,” or “sins of the fathers,” or characters like Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet, Scarface, and the obvious Hatfields versus McCoys. And various and sundry other skid row hard luck stories that were better left forgotten.

  On the other hand, there was lots of fighting going on and all down through the ages, too. Fistfighting, cage fighting, martial-arts fighting, sibling fighting, dogfighting, cockfighting, child abuse, spousal abuse, elder abuse, animal abuse, and just plain want-to-hit-you-in-the-face-because-I’m-drunk-and-you’re-handy abuse. And that brought her up to drunkenness, assaulting a police officer, evading arrest, fleeing the scene of a crime, battery, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, vice, prostitution, illegal distillery, and theft, robbery, armed robbery, and murder.

  Fortunately, most of that occurred before 1990. She zeroed in on the recent charges, of which there were also plenty. Wow, maybe she and Bud ought to just set fire to the whole kit and caboodle of said whacked-out-of-their-gourds Old MacDonalds, and be done with it, already. That might save future Canton County detectives a whole heck of a lot of grief in the upcoming decades.

  Interestingly, she found that a call had come in about three weeks ago about an altercation at the Parker Quick Stop. Apparently, some customer had called in and reported that the Parker brothers were having a fistfight in the driveway of the very restaurant where she and Joe had enjoyed the excellent crispy fried chicken and titillating Parker repartee. According to the unidentified 911 caller, they all were going at each other in a serious assault worthy sort of way, with their fists and weighted saps, a fight that quickly turned into an all-out brawl. By the time, the patrol officers arrived, however, all was over and nobody knew anything about anything. But the reason the caller gave for the altercation was rudeness. Rudeness? Lord have mercy. Apparently, one of the Parkers had asked another one rather impolitely to exit the family establishment and had quickly been knocked into next week. Hmm. Not a brotherly thing, that, nope, not by a long shot.

  Staring at the screen, she thought about it for a little while. S
o the Parker family wasn’t quite so full of brotherly love, after all. Maybe the Fitches were gonna get a pass this time. Which would probably be the first time since the early days of Elvis, when their mutual hatred was young and just getting up to a nice strong boil. Now what would make one of the Parker siblings get so bent out of shape that he would attack Brother O’ Mine? A woman, no doubt, oh, yeah. Why was it always a woman? Again, the you-can’t-live-with-them analogy filled her mind. She was glad that Black only beat up people when he had a good reason, and it was a rare occurrence, even then. Ditto with her.

  Then Claire wondered if Blythe had something going on in her past that they just hadn’t turned up yet, but that might be a trigger to all this infighting and violence. It was worth investigating. Yep, another call on said albino sparrow was definitely in the cards. And they might want to ask her what the hell was the delay on dealing with her poor dead husband’s cadaver, too. But in a nice way, of course. Bud probably would have to do that. Claire was becoming annoyed with the whole double dose of nutty as a fruitcake.

  Deciding that there was no better time than the present, she Googled the name Blythe Petrov Parker and seconds later, the page displayed the top sites for dirt on the aforementioned lady. Claire picked one that bragged about giving all background information. She got the address of the ultra-modern house overlooking cliff and lake vistas. She got the spouse’s name as Ivan Petrov followed by Paul Parker. But the one fact that really stood out in bright and blinking black cursor was in the maiden name slot. Because, ta-da, it said FITCH. Wow, and more wow, a dozen wows echoing into oblivion. So then, was that the Fitch connection to Ivan Petrov and Anna Kafelnikov? Something else she was going to have to delve into and clear up ASAP, accentuating the S. But man, oh, man, this case was gonna be a doozy and a wild ride of epic proportions. Well, good. That’s the way she liked it, got her engines revving, and all that.