Джон Коннолли - The Dirty South

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he was speaking not to one dead girl but to four dead children. He thought that were he to pull over and descend into the woods, he would discover them waiting, paused in the act of shadowing: three young black women, and with them a fourth – a white child, wandering. He saw darkness curl into a tunnel of smoke, and a light shining like a vermilion wound at the heart of the world. Moisture touched his cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and it came away bloody. He looked in the rearview mirror. A line of red trickled from his scalp and dripped onto his face. He had no recollection of injuring himself. He pushed back his hair to reveal the source, but could not locate it. There was only blood, except that he could no longer say with any certainty that it was his own.

96

The two cars pulled up in front of the abandoned gas station, and the stained, pitted screen of the drive-in theater came briefly alive with the shadows of passing clouds, like the remembrance of some old movie retained in the aluminum panels.

‘Why this place?’ said Angel, as he and Louis joined Parker in the forecourt.

‘Because someone took a blade to a possum here,’ said Parker. He had cleaned the blood from his face with the sleeve of his jacket and now could no longer detect the stain on the material. It was as though it had never been.

From somewhere in the untidy depths of his clothing, Angel produced a zippered leather pouch, which he opened to reveal an old but well-tended set of picks, torsion wrenches, and skeleton keys. Angel rarely traveled without the tools of his former – and, Parker suspected, periodically current – trade. He walked to the garage building and began testing each padlock with a pick, although without trying to open any of them. To Parker’s eye, all the locks looked old and rusted, but he said nothing and left Angel to finish his work.

‘The lock on the side door is in use, and so is the one on the main garage entrance on the left,’ said Angel, when he was done, ‘but the side door more than the other. The rest haven’t been opened in a long time.’

‘Can you get me in?’

‘Which door would you prefer?’

‘Side.’

‘Done.’

It took about ten seconds. The smell hit Parker as soon as Angel opened the door: putrefaction, and something older resembling the mustiness of a tomb. Parker took his gloves from his pocket and pulled them on. He reached inside the doorway and located the light switch. Only one of the fluorescents flickered to life, but it was enough for him to see what lay within: a Toyota Tercel with Arkansas plates, a human shape behind the wheel; and a body cocooned in plastic in a corner, its outline distorted by what appeared to be spikes beneath the covering.

Louis unfolded a clean white handkerchief and offered it to Parker. It smelled of expensive male scent – not sufficiently to mask entirely the stench from the garage, but enough to take the edge away.

‘Get the cars out of sight,’ he told Louis.

The road was quiet, and the property didn’t appear to be overlooked, but Parker didn’t want whoever was responsible for maintaining this place to be alerted should they happen to chance by. He held the handkerchief to his nose and stepped into the garage. He went first to the car and opened the passenger door. The body in the driver’s seat was heavily swollen, and the bugs had begun to colonize it, but he could still tell that he was looking at a dead black woman, her mouth forming an oval around the branch that had been jammed down her throat. There was dried blood around her nose and chin, but he could see no other signs of injury. The make and license number matched that of Sallie Kernigan’s vehicle.

Parker did not touch the body, but gently closed the door before moving on to the plastic-wrapped remains. They were much older, and almost skeletonized, but Parker could tell they were male. Sharp sticks had been driven deeply into the legs, arms, and torso, held in place by the plastic even as decomposition had gradually excised the flesh. A larger stake protruded from the damaged jaws, and another appeared to have been inserted deep into the victim’s rectum. Two fingers were missing from the right hand, but the damage seemed old. On a shelf nearby, Parker saw a jar of yellowing preservative. Lying at the bottom were the amputated digits. If Parker was correct, he was looking at what was left of Hollis Ward.

He made a cursory search of the rest of the garage, but found nothing more than old pornographic calendars, rusting equipment, and disintegrating tires. He went back outside, removed the handkerchief from his face, and breathed deeply of the fresh air, although the smell of the woman’s rot now clung to him. He took out his cell phone and found the number for Eddy Rauls. The former chief investigator picked up on the second ring, as though he spent his days sitting by the phone, perhaps waiting for this very call.

‘Mr Rauls? It’s Charlie Parker.’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘What do you know about the abandoned gas station at the end of your road?’

‘Hollis Ward’s old place? I don’t pay much attention to it. It’s a Cade property now.’

‘Who looks after it for them?’

‘I don’t think it’s much looked after at all. It’s just waiting for the wrecking ball. But the son comes by now and again to check the locks. He told me once that Pappy threw him a few bucks a month to keep an eye on unoccupied premises and make sure kids couldn’t break in and start a fire.’

‘Which son?’

‘The younger one, Nealus. Said it gave him a sense of purpose …’

97

Nealus Cade drew closer to Cargill. He wasn’t driving the Nissan, or even the beat-up Dodge, but an Acura with a cloned plate, bought for cash from a junkyard in Linden, Texas, and stored in the garage of one of the properties he tended for the family. From the trunk of the car came a faint thudding, as of feet banging against metal. Beside Nealus lay two thick sticks. They were very straight, and each had been sharpened at one end. Nealus had learned from earlier mistakes. The sticks went in easier if they were spiked.

He crested a rise and the Karagol lay before him, the sunlight barely visible on the surface of the water. It remained black, with only the faintest trace of fire reflected upon it, like pitch set to burning. Once the girl was dead, he’d park nearby and wait until full dark. He’d chosen the spot earlier, marked by two young pines that had been brought down crossways. It wouldn’t take much effort to move the topmost and make them perpendicular.

After that, he would tie the corpse to the trees and wait for them to come for him.

98

Parker caught Griffin on his cell phone as he was leaving his house, the chief having headed home to change his clothing after hours spent trudging through the Ouachita.

‘It’s Nealus Cade,’ said Parker, and told Griffin of what he had found at the garage.

‘Jesus. Look, this may have nothing to do with it, but Kel Knight just got a call from a woman named Nora McCullough. Her daughter Maryanne didn’t come home from school today. Kel told her not to panic, and to check with Maryanne’s friends, because they were all sent home early due to a problem with the heating. Now, though—’

‘Nealus drives a red Nissan coupe, but he has another vehicle, a Dodge,’ said Parker. ‘He told me it was undergoing repairs, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have lied.’

‘We’ll find it – and him. Stay at the garage for now until I can get someone up there to relieve you.’

Parker didn’t want to stay at the garage. He wanted to hunt for Nealus Cade, but he could understand Griffin’s reasons for asking him to remain there.