Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

She was tall. Not stork-like, the way Minerva was put together. A hint of power down through those legs. Her dark hair was cut in a bob. She wore dun-colored Carhartts and a T-shirt of palest blue.

She had followed him into the grocery store. Maybe she was craving a Hershey’s bar or a pack of Now and Laters. She didn’t seem threatening. He caught her reflection in the fish-eye mirror at the head of each aisle.

A bag boy put Micah’s items in a brown paper sack. The woman idled behind him. She didn’t have a thing in her basket. She seemed to realize this, and tossed a pack of chewing gum into it.

His truck was parked around the side of the store in the shade of a bur oak. He dropped the tailgate and dug a can of Blatz out of the bag. He punched two holes in the lid with the church key and took a deep drink.

The woman rounded the store. Her face was startling. Her eyes were a peculiar blue—the blue of the water in an Arctic lake—and her hair was so black it reflected the sunlight. But neither of those details was jarring. No, it was the skin on the left side of her face, trailing under her ear and along her jaw, on down her throat. The flesh was mottled and runneled like wax that pooled around a lit candle.

She stopped. She put her hands in her pockets and rocked forward at the hips. Micah was not worried about her—but he scanned behind her, waiting for someone else to show.

“Micah Shughrue?”

She took a step toward him. It was one of the worst facial burns Micah had ever seen. He couldn’t imagine how it had happened or who might have done it to her. She would have been beautiful without it. Micah could not say that she wasn’t, even with it.

“Sherri Bellhaven told me I might find you here,” she said. “In Angel Fire, I mean. Not the grocery store.”

Micah knew Sherri Bellhaven. He’d done a few jobs with her fellow, Leroy Huggins. Bellhaven had been a bank clerk. A square john with a taste for rough customers. Micah had liked Sherri, but believed those tastes would get her in trouble eventually.

He said, “I used to know her.”

“She’s my sister. I’m Ellen Bellhaven.”

Ellen pulled a pack of Doublemint from her pocket and unwrapped a stick. Micah hitched his foot up on the tailgate, balancing his elbow on his knee. Glugged some beer.

“How is she?”

“In jail.” She balled up the foil and flicked it off her thumb. “Up in Tacoma.”

Micah just drank his beer.

“She trusted the wrong people,” Ellen Bellhaven said when it became clear he wasn’t going to speak. “Same old story, huh?”

Micah finished his beer and dropped the empty into the bag. He dug out another can. The woman, Ellen, watched him. Did she expect him to offer her one? He’d give her one if she asked.

“She heard you were out here. Jailhouse intel,” she said.

Eight months ago, Micah had sent Leroy an envelope with the ten dollars he owed. He forgot what Leroy had loaned him the money for, but he never forgot a debt. The letter’s postmark had been Angel Fire. Perhaps that was the how as to why this woman was facing him now.

Ellen laughed. “Like I know a thing about jail! I hardly even got grounded as a kid. The good girl, that was me. Sherri, on the other hand, got grounded so often that her windowsill had grooves in it, she had to sneak out so much.”

Ellen was babbling a little. Micah understood. Normal people tended to do that in his presence.

“Listen,” she said, “are you… ah, for hire?”

Why did some people think he was available for scut work? You want someone to pull your kitty out of a tree? Call a fireman.

“No.”

Her throat flushed; the blush carried up to enflame her unburned cheek. “Oh. Okay. It’s just that my sister said maybe you could—”

“You in trouble?”

“Me?” She shook her head. “No, no, it’s my sister. Her son, actually. Nate. He’s been abducted, I guess you could say.”

“So call the police.”

“No can do. He was taken by his father.”

“You call that an abduction? Your sister is in the clink.”

Ellen nodded. “Sure. Where else is the kid going to go, right? It’s not that Reggie—that’s his father—it’s not that he’s taken Nate so much as where he’s taken him.”

Micah raised an eyebrow.

“Little Heaven,” Ellen said. “You heard of it?”

Micah shook his head.

“It’s some kind of a compound,” Ellen went on. “Survivalist? Really, I don’t know the who or why of it. Religious nuts. Reggie nearly died two years ago, yeah? He was a mailman. Heart attack on his route. The doctors hit him with those shock paddles to kick-start his heart. He woke up blubbering in tongues. A real come-to-Jesus moment. Sherri says he started going on and on about taking his faith to the next level.”

“When I knew Sherri, she was with Leroy Huggins.”

“I remember Leroy,” said Ellen. “Decent guy. Good for my sister, apart from the criminal tendencies.”

Micah drank his beer.

“So anyway, Reggie’s the new guy. Sherri gave up dating badasses. Total one-eighty. She and Reggie started dating after Leroy; it lasted a few years, and Nate was the fruit of it. I met Reggie once, at Nate’s christening. A prissy bald-headed guy with spectacles, his back all stooped from delivering the weekly Pennysaver .”

“Only the one time?”

She started. “Pardon?”

“Only the one time you met him?”

She nodded. “I haven’t seen Nate since he was a tot, either.” Ellen probably expected Micah to ask why. When he didn’t, she told him anyway. “I had some issues of my own during those years. Sherri took the straight and narrow. I strayed, then came back to heel. Then Sherri went off the reservation entirely.”

“So your nephew…”

“Is at Little Heaven. With Reggie. Living with a bunch of snake handlers, for all I know.” She dipped her chin. “You a religious sort?”

Micah shook his head.

“Me neither. I mean, okay, Unitarian, Methodist, those vanilla faiths—fill your boots. But some camp in the forest, people dressed in robes praying eight hours a day…”

She threw her arms up in evident frustration. Micah noted the burn scar carried down her left arm and peeked from the sleeve of her T-shirt.

“Sorry. I’m probably boring the piss out of you.”

“My piss remains in my bladder,” he told her. “I find this interesting.”

That was not one hundred percent true. Micah had heard stories like this a dozen times. But those stories had not been told by Ms. Ellen Bellhaven, from Parts Unknown.

He said, “You try the cops at all?”

“Sherri barked up that tree already. Like I said, custody of Nate fell to Reggie after my sister went to jail. He’s a mailman, for Christ’s sake. Police hear that—stable job, money in the bank—okay, they figure the kid’s fine.”

Could be he is fine , Micah thought. Sure, he is getting a bellyful of scripture, but there are worse things. He is with his father, not huffing diesel fuel out of a jam jar.

“What is your stake in it?”

Ellen looked at him funny. The sunlight fell through the oak leaves and settled on her arresting face.

“You said you hardly even know your nephew,” Micah went on.

“And that matters?”

Micah squinted at the sky. He felt itchy all over. Ah, fuck it. “Beer?”

He punched holes in a can and left it on the tailgate. Ellen came closer to pick it up. She ran the cold can across her forehead. She took the gum out of her mouth and stuck it on the top and took a sip.

“Thanks.”

She pulled a dollar bill from her pocket and dropped it into the grocery sack. Micah took it out and put it into his pocket.