Hell on Church Street

by Jake Hinkson

  When I was packed and ready to go, I took one last look around the house.

  I went to the back door and eased it open. I peeked around and, sensing no one, crept out. The air was sharp and cold, the same way it had been when Ian and Van led me into the woods. I was above the cold, above the pain in my chest and bones. Adrenaline pushed me forward. I kept below the sill of the living room windows and snuck around to the front of the house. There was no car. No truck. No SUV. No one was watching the house.

  I got in my car and was off. I could have left town right then and who knows what might have happened? But I drove to Angela.

  It’s hard to tell you how I felt about her right then. I wasn’t thinking of love, and I wasn’t thinking of lust. But I was scared. I guess I just wanted someone with me.

  When I got there, I didn’t see her aunt’s car in the driveway. I pulled up and sat for a second. I was too scared to get out of the car. I was too scared to drive away.

  Then the front door opened, and she walked out. Her thick coat was buttoned up to her neck, and she was wearing a sock cap. I rolled down the window.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I came to see you,” I said.

  “I heard you got out of the hospital,” she said. “I wanted to see you,” She looked around as if someone might be watching.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I just told you.”

  “No, why are you looking around?”

  She held up her palms. “You’re acting weird. What are you doing?”

  “Come on,” I said. I motioned her toward the passenger seat.

  “Now where are you going?”

  “We can’t talk out here. Get in the car. I’ll tell you while we drive around.”

  “I don’t want to get in the car with you.”

  I said, “I’m freezing, Angela. My neck hurts. And I’m in trouble. Please get in the car, so we don’t have to talk out here.”

  “Why don’t we go in the house?”

  “Because we can’t, baby. Please get in. I haven’t talked to you in days, and that’s all I’ve wanted to do.”

  She looked around again. I watched her. I could always read her, and it was all there on her face. The pull. I was her first and only lover. I was all she really had left after her parents died, and despite everything she might think or fear, she desperately wanted to believe me and love me. I could still make this happen.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them and came around the car and got in.

  As she got in, I didn’t look around to see if the neighbors were peeking out their windows. They probably were. I knew that. The news that I was running off with the Card girl would tear through town like a virus. The church would know, and the cops would know. Everything was ash.

  “We have to leave town,” I said.

  I backed out and started down the street.

  “I’m not leaving town,” she said flatly. She sounded like she was forty years old. “You can stop right now if you think you’re taking me out of town.”

  I rubbed my face. We slid past the edge of the neighborhood. A few minutes later we passed a church, and I shook my head.

  She was looking at me, and it was impossible to drive and read her face at the same time, but it felt like she was concerned about me.

  “Are you okay? Your neck?”

  “It hurts.” I showed her the splints on my left hand. “Three broken fingers.”

  “What happened?”

  I shook my head. I knew I could make this happen. I could feed her a story and make her believe it. I could still pull it off. But I needed energy. I needed desire. And right then I was empty. I was scared. I couldn’t pull it off.

  She looked in the backseat and saw the suitcase.

  “You’re running away?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why are you leaving?” she asked me.

  “Some people want to kill me,” I said. “Some other people are talking about me and you. Some other people want to put me in jail. A lot of people are looking to do a lot of things to me.”

  “People know about us?”

  “Didn’t you tell them?”

  She frowned. “I told my brother.”

  On another night I might have been able to roll with that news. But I was tired and scared and hurting. “That was stupid,” I said.

  “Don’t call me stupid.”

  “That was incredibly fucking stupid.”

  “Don’t call me stupid. I’m not stupid. You think I am, but I’m not.”

  “Then why would you tell your fucking brother about us? How did that seem like a good idea?”

  “I never heard you talk that way before, using the F-word.”

  I shook my head. I wished I hadn’t picked her up now. “That’s what you’re worrying about? At a time like this, you’re concerned about my cussing?”

  She sat, silent and thinking. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I’m driving around. Don’t worry. I’m not about to kidnap you. I don’t know what you think of me, but I’m not going to force you to leave town against your will. You can stay here with your brother and Nick and all the other assholes at the church.”

  “You say that like they’re a bunch of bad people,” she said.

  “Aren’t they?”

  “They’re all better than you,” she grunted. I drove past a trailer park and down a lonely corridor of trees.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “Now you hate me.”

  She looked behind us. “Where are we going?”

  “Nowhere. I told you, I’m just driving around.”

  We passed a tiny salvage yard out there in the middle of nowhere, and then there was nothing but trees holding up the overburdened starry sky.

  Angela stared at my headlights coldly tunneling into the darkness before us. “I want to go home,” she said.

  “I’ll take you home.”

  “Stop the car,” she demanded, but her voice was wobbling a bit. “Turn around and take me home right now.”

  “Don’t be that way,” I said. “Relax. I have some things I think we need to talk about.”

  She stared at me, chewing at the inside of her mouth. “Where are you taking me?”

  “I’m not taking you anywhere. We’re driving around, talking.”

  Before I knew what had happened, she started to cry.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Because you’re scaring me. You just keep driving even though I told you I want to go home.”

  “Now you’re just being stupid,” I told her. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you. You know I wouldn’t hurt you. You know that, right?”

  She looked behind us but there was nothing back there but darkness and the red glow of my taillights. She started to cry harder. It frustrated me.

  “You need to stop that,” I told her.

  “I’m not mad at you anymore, okay? Please, just take me home.”

  “Why do you keep crying? Christ. Get a hold of yourself.”

  “Please take me home,” she said. “I won’t tell anybody I saw you. I’ll tell Gabe and Nick I was lying.”

  “Nick?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you talk to Nick?”

  “No.”

  “You just said his name. Why did you just say his name? You said Gabe and Nick.”

  “I didn’t tell him anything. I told Gabe, and I think he told Nick. But maybe he didn’t, maybe he didn’t.”

  I punched the steering wheel. “Goddamn it!” I yelled. “Why would you do that? Everything I’ve done was so we could be together. There are people after me. The Norris family. Do you know who they are? They’re Sheriff Norris’s family, and do you know why they’re after me? Do you? Because I killed him, Angela. I didn’t mean to, but I killed him to protect us. He wanted to tell everyone about me and you.”

  She sobbed now, holding her face in her hands. “Please,” she said.

/>   “But you already did. You told Gabe and Nick.”

  She wobbled out please again. It was getting irritating.

  “Why are you afraid?” I demanded.

  “Please…” She was trembling. “I shouldn’t be here. They said I shouldn’t see you again. I shouldn’t be here.”

  “Why are you afraid of me, Angela? Talk to me. What are you afraid of? What do you think you know? What kind of ideas has Nick been giving you?”

  She was still trying to say please but it wouldn’t come out because of her crying. Slowly, she started to hyperventilate. Within a few seconds she was huffing and gasping for air.

  “For Christ’s sake, stop it,” I said. “Just take a deep breath and let’s have a conversation about all of this. Did you hear what I just told you?”

  When she squeaked out another please I shouted, “Jesus!” and swung over to the side of the road and threw the car in park. Dust swam in my high beams.

  Her breathing got worse, like she was dying.

  “Stop doing that!”

  “Please,” she coughed.

  “Stop saying ‘please’ like I’m doing something bad to you. You slow down and tell me why you’re so upset. We can figure this out together. You think you know something terrible, don’t you? But you don’t. You’ve gotten bad information and you’ve listened to the wrong people and none of it, none of it, is true. They all just want to steal the church away from me. They want to steal you away from me.”

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

  “Good,” I said. “Now open your eyes and look at me.”

  She opened her eyes. She looked at me.

  I don’t know what I thought she was going to see. Maybe I was hoping she’d open her eyes, look at me and see how much, despite all the bad things that had happened, I truly loved her.

  But when she opened her eyes and fixed them on me, I knew in an instant I had lost her. She turned white, blank, emptied of Angela and filled with a horror of me. In that instant, her face seemed to absorb all my sins. It was like looking into a mirror for the first time and discovering you’re a monster.

  She fumbled the door open and fell out of the car. I scrambled out of my seat. Neither of us made a sound. We were past words. By the time I got outside, she was already running, her footsteps crunching in the grass leading to the woods. We ran in the pale headlights, her long, frantic shadow flickering across the trees. As I got closer to her, my shadow swallowed hers.

  I caught her at the edge of the woods. Turning around she screamed and punched me in the face. The pain shot down my neck and down my back and into my stomach and groin. As I collapsed in the damp leaves, she started running again. I forced myself up and started after her. It wasn’t easy. But her sock cap had slipped off and her hair was flowing behind her, and I grabbed her hair and pulled her down.

  I pulled out the knife. She wailed and kicked and bit at me, but I stabbed her three times in the chest and that was all there was. The third time I really got her, and she stopped fighting and just lay there and bled to death. It took a while, and we lay in the freezing ditch and she died fast, but not as fast as her parents. Her head was tilted back in the mud, and her last cold breaths spurted out. They got shorter. The final one was only a wisp that curled off her upper lip and dissipated in the night air.

  I lay there for a few moments after she was gone and stared at my own breath. Finally I got up. I pulled the knife out of her, and it caught on her coat. I had to work it out and cut myself in the process. Not bad, but I opened the skin on the back of my left hand.

  I cleaned the knife off on her coat and left her there, on her back, staring up at the cloudless night sky, that endless expanse of shivering stars.

  Part Three:

  The Worst Man in the World

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “And that’s all there is,” Webb told me. In the light from the dashboard, his face was a pale green and his eyes were black. “I disappeared after that. I cleaned out my bank account and drove west, staying to backroads, parking in the woods during the day, driving at night. I heard about myself on the radio a few days after I left town. My name, description, and the make and model of my car. At first it was assumed that Angela had run off with me, but in the early morning on the third day of my escape her body was discovered by convicts out picking up trash. I drove and drove, swapping license plates a couple of times, taking it slow and safe, gassing up at night and avoiding people whenever I could. I finally wound up outside of a dirty little town in Texas. There weren’t a lot of prying eyes, but I knew I was I taking too big a risk keeping my car. So I drove out to the woods, buried the license plates and burned the inspection sticker and insurance papers. Then I covered the car in limbs. It was a long walk to the nearest town to get a Greyhound but that only increased my chances of the car going undetected for a while. When I did find a bus, I rode west.”

  “Why are we back in Arkansas?”

  It was the first thing I’d said in a long while, and my voice cracked when I said it. There was something weird about hearing myself again. We had been in Arkansas for a couple of hours, sliding in from Oklahoma, past the foothills of the Ozark Mountains where, I guess, Doolittle Norris had tried to kill Webb. We had driven through Little Rock, a small city by a small river. Then he’d taken an exit, and we were in some shitty section on the outskirts of the city. Nothing but fast food joints, pawn shops and check cashing places.

  We passed a billboard, with a big cartoon dollar bill on it, that read: FREE BUCKS BACK.

  “Why would you come back here?” I asked. This time my voice didn’t crack.

  “I’m coming to that in a minute,” he said. “I grew a beard, dyed my hair blond and dressed like a beggar. I became a beggar with Bertie Mae’s gun and a little under a thousand dollars in my pocket. I drifted. I don’t know how it is with other fugitives, but I never had much trouble avoiding the cops. I just stayed out of the way. I ate when I had to, drifted from here to there, slept during the day and only came out at night. Somewhere in southern California a bum beat me up and took the gun and some of my money, but I had the majority of it in a sock. Most people just looked the other way when they saw my dirty, shambling form swaying up the street in front of them.

  “Everyday I worried about being caught, but then one afternoon I was sitting outside a little truck stop eating a candy bar I’d found half finished in a dumpster when I overheard a radio news report from a mini-van at the curb. The man driving the mini-van was airing up his tire while his wife and kids were inside loading up on pork rinds and Mountain Dew. His door was open and the announcer on the radio said my car had been found and positively identified in a three car pile up in the desert near Twenty Nine Palms. The body inside was believed to be mine.

  “It took me a while to get the whole story, but the way I understand it some drifter stumbled across my car, took a try with starting it, was probably shocked to find that it worked and rode off into the sunset. And then somewhere around the Marine base in Twenty-Nine Palms he got into a terrible wreck and burned to death.”

  “You’re lucky as hell,” I said. “I’ve never been that lucky in my life.”

  “Well, yes, at first I greeted the news as a miracle, but I haven’t even gotten to the lucky part yet. Of course, they figured out pretty quickly it wasn’t me in the car. But then the damnedest thing happened. It turned out the guy in the car was wanted for a couple of murders in Nevada. When the cops found my blood in the car, from where I had cut myself the night I killed Angela, they assumed I’d been hacked up somewhere. They probably kept looking for a while, but they wrote me off pretty quickly.

  “After the first year or so, after the fire and the dead body in the car, I finally stopped running and I wound up in the north. That’s when I started to live like a termite. It doesn’t matter where a termite lives. I stayed in the dark, and I consumed. I replaced ambition with food. I consumed cheap food by the truckload and got fat and smoked cigarettes a
nd watched pornography and lived in a state of filthy poverty.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Years.”

  “So why are you here now?”

  “Because a couple of nights ago I saw Oscar.”

  “Oscar…the kid Angela had the crush on?”

  Webb nodded. “In a crappy corner of a dark little nothing city a thousand miles from Arkansas, he walked right in the front door of the supermarket I work at.”

  “Maybe he didn’t notice you.”

  Webb shook his head. “He looked right at me. It took him a moment, but he put it together. I didn’t recognize him at first, either. The last time I saw him, he was a teenager. He’s a grown man now, with thinning hair and the beginnings of a paunch. We had one of those awkward moments where you know you know someone but you can’t quite place them. And then he smiled that dumb alabaster smile, and it clicked for me. Oscar. Stupid, handsome Oscar. And at the same instant, beneath the beard and the fat and the distance of years and worry on my face, he recognized me.”

  “Sure he recognized you? Did he say anything?”

  “Nothing, but I could tell he recognized me. We only met once, years ago, but I murdered a girl he went to school with. I murdered her parents and the county sheriff. Now, think of it from his point of view. He once met Geoffrey Webb, the cold-blooded serial killer being hunted across Arkansas and Texas on the news, and he shook my hand. He probably tells the story at parties—‘How I Met The Killer At Church.’ When he saw me at the store, he turned white and his smile dropped like a guillotine. He hustled out the door pretty quick, and I expect he was on the phone before he got to his car.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I took off my apron and left out the back door. I ran.”

  “When was that?”

  “A couple of days ago. I’ve been running since then. Thinking. Thinking for the first time in years. I had shut down my brain, shut down my life, turned myself into nothing but a mouth and a distended stomach. But then Oscar walked in the door and I thought, ‘Oh, Jesus, that’s Oscar.’ And since I had that horrible thought, my mind has been like a boat taking on water. Everything started to sink, and it’s been sinking ever since. Now that the police know I’m alive, they’ll be looking for me, and they won’t stop this time until they find me.”