(II)
It was dirty work,
but that was what Ricky Caudill was cut out for. He didn’t like to
be bored. His brother had done a good job last night, real down and
dirty, and the effect was exactly what they’d been hired for.
Junior had killed the Hilds in grand style, and Trey had flaked
their room at the Stanherd house. So . . .
Tonight’s my turn.
It should be a fast,
easy job. Those first dozen or so disappearances hadn’t done the
trick. No dice, Ricky thought. As it
turned out, only a handful of Squatters had left. So Felps had this
new idea, something on a bigger scale. If the state cops thought
the Squatters were running an extensive meth operation, they’d
roust them big-time, and Judy would just say to hell with it, and
sell the land out from under them anyway. Then . . .
Problem solved.
The moon hung low
beneath reefs of clouds. Ricky slipped through the woods along a
barely visible trail. He didn’t hear many cicadas tonight; their
season would be ending soon. Ricky felt totally alone and totally
at peace. Another hundred yards or so and he’d be at the tree line
around the Point.
In one hand he
carried his bag of “supplies”: two bottles of denatured alcohol,
some Breathe-Free sinus medication, a smaller bottle of acetone,
matchbooks, and a couple of grams of crystal meth. Most of it would
be destroyed in the fire, but there’d still be enough traces left
over to convince the police and fire department what had happened.
The plan sounded perfectly plausible; all the time you’d hear how
meth-heads would accidentally spill a little solvent on their stove
elements, and next thing they knew, their trailer was burning down.
That was what was going to happen tonight.
In his other hand, he
carried a hubcap mallet.
Almost there, Ricky thought. At the wood line, he
slowed. The only trick was getting in and out without being seen.
He’d already had the place picked out; some Squatter named David
Something-or-other had himself a small wooden shack at the western
edge of the woods, fairly far away from most of the
others.
He crept up, careful
not to let the bag crinkle. Moonlight painted one side of the shack
luminous white. Shit . . . He slipped
by quickly, then plunged into the darkness of the shack’s front
side. No lights could be detected from the makeshift windows, but
he did hear snoring—a good thing.
And another good
thing: out here in the quiet, peaceful boondocks, nobody ever
locked their doors. Hell, most of these Squatter shacks didn’t even
have doors, just curtains or hinged
planks, or sheet plastic, like this guy had.
Ricky ever so quietly
set the bag of incriminating supplies down on the front stoop; then
he stepped through the sheet plastic.
He’d seen David
Something-or-other on the docks and around town in the past. Didn’t
know the guy, but then Ricky didn’t associate with Squatters,
except maybe some of the trashier girls for twenty-dollar tricks,
but there weren’t many who did that. This guy was in his thirties,
it looked like, short like all the Squatters, but built up pretty
well from working his ass off all his life hauling crab bushels.
Ricky, on the other hand, was more fat than muscle, and without
some backup or a knife—or, in this case, a big hard-rubber hubcap
mallet—he probably wouldn’t stand a chance against this David
cracker.
Except when he’s asleep, Ricky thought, smiling in
the dark.
He supposed about the only thing more despicable
than shooting a man in the back was cracking him in the head with a
hubcap mallet while he slept like a baby in his own home. This was
Ricky’s speed.
When he’d slipped
through the facsimile of a front door, he plunged into more
darkness. Bars of moonlight fell in wedges across the floor. Upon
entering, he’d rustled the plastic a little—not much of a sound
under regular circumstances, but loud as holy hell when you were
trying to kill a man. Ricky gritted his brown teeth at the rustle,
then stepped quickly aside so that no moonlight might give him
away. He stood dark as a shadow himself.
He let his eyes
adjust, roving. A cheap, shitty little place like most of them, but
it looked clean, much cleaner, in fact, than the cheap, shitty
little house he shared with his even more demented
brother.
He spotted some
bookshelves and some cabinets, and a cubby of a kitchen with what
looked like a thirty-year-old refrigerator. There was also one of
those mini stove/oven combos that folks had in efficiency
apartments. Perfect, he thought. His
instructions were explicit: drop some of the allergy pills in the
bottom of the saucepan and leave it on the stove. It would look to
the fire marshal and cops like good ol’ David Something-or-other
had been cooking the shit down with denatured alcohol, the stuff
had ignited, and then . the whole joint burned down. He’d leave the
other stuff lying around, too, and drag David’s dead or unconscious
body out of his bed and let him burn up with everything else. If
Ricky did it right, the hubcap ’ mallet wouldn’t crack the skull,
so it wouldn’t look like murder.
But . . . where is the guy? Ricky
wondered.
He could hear him
snoring. He strained his vision, then let more things become
visible in the room.
There’s the cracker.
It was just an old
spring cot the guy slept on. Ricky could make out the form of his
body, and the short ink-black hair that almost looked darker than
the darkness.
Time to rock, he thought, hefting the mallet’s
weight in his hand. He moved forward in short, silent steps. When
he got closer he noticed a roughly cut stone of some kind hanging
over the guy’s bed; Ricky wouldn’t know in a million years that it
was specifically a chrysolite stone, said to bid good dreams and
protect one’s home from evil. The stone wasn’t exactly doing a
great job tonight.
Another few steps and
he was at the head of the cot, looking right down at the stupid
rube. The mallet froze high over his head, and in that moment Ricky
could see his own shadow thrown against one wall: a shadow of
death, a haunter of the dark.
At that single image
he smiled, his heart beating faster, because he looked bigger now
than he ever had.
“Who
the—”
The Squatter’s eyes
glimmered in the moonlight, wide open. A hand shot upward,
but—
Thud!
—too
late.
One whack with the
mallet was all it took. Ricky patted the top of the guy’s head,
felt no fractures. Good job. Didn’t
matter if he was dead or not, because he’d surely die in the fire
that Ricky would start in a few minutes. David Something-or-other’s
lights were out for good.
A macabre realization
occurred to him then. The last thing this
weirdo hillbilly saw in his life . . . was me.
Ricky liked
that.
He went back out and
grabbed the bag. It didn’t take long to put the matchbooks up in a
cupboard, along with the acetone and the first bottle of denatured
alcohol. Next he pulled a small boiling pot off the wall, set it on
the stove, and dropped in a handful of allergy pills.
Now all I gotta do is drag the cracker out of his bed,
empty the other bottle of alcohol around the joint . . . and light
’er up.
Ricky liked fires.
He’d liked to look at them since he was a kid-when he’d burned his
mother and stepfather’s house down with them in it. Bitch had it comin ‘fer lettin’ her old man make me ‘n’
Junior . . . He didn’t finish the thought, but it would
suffice to say that fires made him feel like a success. They made
him feel transcendental . . . not that he had any clue what
that meant.
With some huffing, he
dragged the Squatter out of the cot and left him to lie across the
floor. Ricky didn’t notice his chest moving up and down, so he
guessed he was dead. Burning the fucker up alive had more kick to
it, but that was the way the cards fell sometimes.
He noticed a jar on
the kitchen counter. Pickled eggs, it looked like. Shit, yeah! I love pickled eggs. He and Junior had
loved them as kids; their mom had made them all the time, before
she’d started boozing hard and passing out every night, leaving
their stepfather free to come into their rooms, and—
Well, that was
another story.
He opened the jar,
was about to grab an egg, but—
Holy shit!
The stink from the
jar hit him in the face like someone dropping a flowerpot on his
head.
Smells worse than a fuckin’ pile a’ dead
dogs.
He put the jar back,
revolted; then—
“Daddy?”
—his eyes bolted
open, and he spun.
Shit!
There was someone
else in the shack.
A slant of moonlight
fell right on her, like a spotlight. A girl—mid-teens, he guessed,
but it was hard to really tell with these Squatter girls because so
many of them blossomed a few years before other girls.
It must’ve been
something in the water.
But whether it was or
not scarcely mattered to Ricky. He was all fucked-up in the head to
begin with, and now—razzed and bristly over busting the cracker’s
coconut in his own bed and about to turn the joint into a
late-night bonfire—he was even more
fucked-up.
His blood felt hot,
excitement tingling on his skin . with his sweat. His crotch felt
tight.
“You’re not my
daddy!” she objected in that weird slur of clan dialect. She cast a
worried glance down at the empty cot.
The guy was lying in
darkness behind Ricky. She can’t see
him, he realized. He saw her own cot now, wedged in the
comer of the room out of the moonlight. “Aw, now don’t’choo worry
‘bout your daddy, sweet- , heart. He’s outside runnin’ a errand,
but he’ll be right back. Me ’n’ him are good buddies.”
The girl’s lower lip
trembled, not that Ricky was looking at her lower lip. He was
looking at the rest, though, his lust holding his eyes
open.
“But I ain’t never
seen you before,” she questioned.
“Oh, well, that’s
’cos me’n yer daddy, see, we work together on them crab
boats.”
Yeah. Ricky was all
fucked-up in the head, all right, and as for the girl?
Well, never mind what
he did to the girl before he set the place ablaze and slipped out
into the night.