Perhaps Odell should have been frightened, but he was not. He knew for certain that Perry was dead, because otherwise this entity in the shape of Perry wouldn’t be standing at the end of the front yard, but Odell detected no threat. The man still had Perry’s eyes, and they were as soft and friendly as ever, but an intelligence inhabited them that had not been present before, and it lit him up from within, like someone had put a lightbulb in Perry’s head and flipped the switch.
Odell’s mother and grandmother were sleeping. He didn’t call them, but instead opened his bedroom window and jumped down. He walked toward the entity at the gate – Perry, or this version of him – and stood within touching distance. A light breeze blew, and it carried the new scent of Perry to Odell: smoke, burnt timber, and mud, as though someone had set a fire in a swamp.
There was blood on Perry Lutter’s left sneaker, and not just drops of it: it was the kind of stain that came from a wound that didn’t stop bleeding until there was no more blood left to give.
‘Did it hurt?’ asked Odell.
Perry didn’t answer. He just smiled.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Odell, although he could not have said for what, exactly. He hadn’t done anything, and he didn’t think he could have prevented whatever had happened to Perry. He was just sorry for all of it, he supposed.
Perry nodded. He turned his back on Odell, crossed the road, and waited for Odell to join him. Odell looked left and right, then followed. He knew that Perry wouldn’t hurt him, and wherever they were going was where they were meant to be.
Odell didn’t even hesitate as they headed into the Cut.
81
The best thing about Dryden’s Inn, in Louis’s opinion, was that it was probably destined to fall down before too long, and then nobody else would ever have to stay there again. Maybe sometime in the past, long before people knew about fripperies like proper plumbing, A/C that didn’t sound like a failing jet engine, and towels with a consistency softer than sandpaper, Dryden’s might have served as an acceptable rest stop for those with suitably low expectations, but it now belonged to another, distant century, just like smallpox and tuberculosis, although Louis wouldn’t have been surprised if a sample of some of the gunk behind the sink in his bathroom had revealed traces of both.
Dryden’s consisted of twenty-four rooms organized in what Louis was convinced was a swastika pattern, with a small office at its heart. The walls of his room were lime green, which contrasted sharply, even painfully, with the brown carpet and harvest-gold drapes. The chairs matched the walls, the lamps matched the carpet, and the bedspreads matched nothing at all. His room had two beds and two chairs, none of which was actually comfortable, although each was uncomfortable in a subtly different way, making Louis feel like Goldilocks wandering through the Three Bears’ house after Baby Bear has left for college and Momma and Poppa Bear have put all his stuff in storage.
He and Angel had opted for separate but adjoining rooms, mainly in order to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. When Morton Dryden, the motel’s proprietor, had asked them their business in Plassey County, in the manner of a man who believed that they had no business being there at all, Louis told him they were researching a book on famous folk and country musicians from West Virginia, which softened the old man up somewhat, especially once Louis revealed that he knew the difference between Mollie O’Brien and Molly O’Day, and knew that Milt Haley, father of the blind fiddle player Ed Haley, had been murdered by a lynch mob in 1889 during the Lincoln County Feud.
If Dryden was tempted to ask what a black man was doing listening to music performed primarily by white musicians, and traditionally associated with Caucasian audiences, he resisted the urge. Instead, he supplied the names of a handful of local good old boys who could play a mean tune, and even burned a few CDs for Louis from his own collection. Louis had to admit that some of it was pretty good, although it all fell on deaf ears where Angel was concerned, for whom any music that involved fiddles, banjos, or tunes that Casey Kasem wouldn’t have played on American Top 40 was safely to be dismissed as ‘hillbilly shit’. To maintain the cover story, Louis had acquired a small library on the area’s music, including Ivan Tribe’s Mountaineer Jamboree and John Lilly’s Mountains of Music, to leave in his room, and had spent two very contented evenings at The Hope Tavern in Mortonsville listening to the pickup bands that performed there most nights.
Now, though, other matters were about to come to a head. Parker had returned, and Oberon had been baited. The Cut could either wait to see what Parker did next, or it could strike. Louis was hoping for the latter: it was a while since he had killed anyone.
It was after four a.m., and Louis could not rest. Angel was fast asleep in his room, as was Parker in his, which was three doors down from Louis’s own. So far, they had not interacted publicly. Better that the Cut believed Parker to be alone. Dryden’s appeared to have a handful of other occupants that night, all of whom were in other wings of the motel. The building was quiet, and only the occasional car passing on the road broke the silence.
Louis usually slept well, but he had been on edge ever since his arrival in Plassey County. He was a man born of the South, but he no longer felt at home there, if he ever really had. He was also anticipating the violence to come. Louis, through his own observations and the probings of those who had come south with him – including a pair of departed Japanese visitors – had developed a sense of the Cut’s people. They were simmering, and soon they would boil over.
But for now, Louis was on a mission of his own. Not only was his latest change of towels more threadbare than usual, they were also pitted with cigarette burns, some of them fresh. Every man has his limits, and Louis had just reached his. So it was that he marched toward the motel office, the towels under his left arm, and a final glass of Vergelegen Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon in his right hand. Improbably, Turley boasted a gourmet store off its main street, with a small but perfectly formed selection of imported wines from which Louis had selected the Vergelegen. He had also bought a box of four Riedel glasses from which to drink it, because he didn’t want to sip good Cab Sauv from motel toothglasses wrapped in paper that boasted of their hygiene and cleanliness while containing what looked like spider eggs.
He reached the motel office. The door was closed, and a sign announced that the proprietor would be back shortly. Louis turned the handle. The door opened. A TV was playing softly, but there was no sign of Dryden or any of the kids who looked after the desk in his absence. A cigarette lay in an ashtray, smokeless but still warm.
Louis put down the towels. Behind the main desk were two rooms, one of which was a sleeping area for staff to use in the small hours. The bed bore the impression of a body, and the sheets were disturbed. A connecting door stood open, revealing an empty bathroom. Next to the bedroom was a small office that, upon closer investigation, proved to contain filing cabinets, boxes of soap and tissues, and two cartons of frozen doughnuts thawing on a table prior to being presented the next morning as part of the motel’s breakfast of coffee and pastries. After some exploration, Louis discovered a couple of packs of thick, fresh towels wrapped in plastic, and apparently never used. He exchanged his own for three of them, stepped into the main office, and departed, closing the door behind him.
He looked at the lot behind the office, where two spaces were reserved for staff. No car sat in either of them. Wherever Dryden or the night manager had gone, he’d taken his wheels with him.
It was a cool night. Louis took a deep breath and inhaled smoke, and the earthy aroma of dead leaves. Now that he had satisfied himself by solving the towel problem, he thought that he might sleep for a few hours.
To his right, a truck pulled up at the edge of the main lot, and three men got out. He heard a second vehicle draw to a halt to his left, although he couldn’t see it, blocked as it was by that wing of the motel. Seconds later, another smell joined the evening’s scents: that of strong, cheap aftershave. The men from the truck we
re now moving quickly but quietly across the lot. Two were carrying rifles, while the other had what looked like a bottle in each hand.
Louis heard footsteps approaching from his left. He drained the last of the wine from his glass, placed one towel on the ground, laid the glass on its side on top of it, then covered it with a second towel. He put his heel on the bowl of the glass, broke it, and gently scattered the fragments on the ground between the office and the wall of the main building. When that was done, he retrieved the stem and moved into the shadows.
The man was careless: careless about where he placed his feet, careless in his approach, careless in not holding the pistol, bulbous with its added suppressor, closer to his body. He barely had time to react to the crunching of the shards beneath his boot before Louis stepped into his right side, his left hand grabbing the pistol while his right, the base of the wineglass flat against the palm, sent the sharp stem into the man’s throat, then twisted it to do maximum damage. It broke off in the wound, sending a gush of red against the night sky, and the motel wall blushed crimson. The man staggered backward and went down, his hand to his throat in an effort to stop the flow of blood, a wet noise heaving from him like a child gathering the strength to cry. Louis recognized him from the Porterhouse. Parker had told him the names of the two men who had sat alongside Harpur Griffin. This was not Lucius, the red-haired one, but the other: Jabal.
Louis didn’t have time to watch him die. A second gunman appeared, armed with a shotgun, and almost stumbled over Jabal’s body. Louis shot him through the heart with Jabal’s gun, the noise loud in the night even with the suppressor. Another truck pulled into the lot at speed, but Louis was already moving to his right, where he risked a glance at the three men who had been advancing across the lot. One was heading Louis’s way, alerted by the gunshot, using the parked cars for cover. The others, farther behind, were trying to get a lighter to strike. Louis could see it sparking, and glimpsed the bottle held close, a second one standing between the feet of the two men. As Louis watched, a flame appeared, and a rag ignited.
And Louis understood. They were going to burn Parker in his room. If he came out, or tried to make a run for it, the men in the lot would shoot him, presumably aided by the two who were now lying dead on the ground, had they survived. The second vehicle, and whoever might be left in it, would cover the back, in case Parker tried to escape through a bathroom window.
The man with the Molotov cocktail drew his arm back to throw, and Louis shot him. The bottle dropped and exploded into flame on the ground, the fire engulfing the legs of his companion as the wounded man dropped to his knees before tumbling face first into the blaze. There was a rattle of semi-automatic fire, and the motel wall to Louis’s left spat fragments of masonry into the air. He pulled back to the office, which had a brick surround beneath its large windows, and tried to draw a bead on the gunman among the cars. Now he heard more shots coming from near Parker’s room – an exchange of fire, which meant Parker and Angel were alert to the danger. Glass broke seconds later, followed by the boom of another Molotov igniting, and the eruption was reflected in the windshields of the cars. Someone cried out in pain, and the second of the attackers in the lot wandered aimlessly into Louis’s sights, the legs of his trousers still smoldering. Before Louis could shoot, the figure tripped over his own feet and lay unmoving on the ground. Behind him, a pyre burned in the shape of a man.
Semi-automatic fire came Louis’s way, this time cutting a swath through the glass of the office, forcing him to lie flat on the ground. He prayed that they had no more Molotovs. If one were lobbed into the office, he wouldn’t stand a chance.
The onslaught on the office ceased, then recommenced piecemeal. Covering fire, thought Louis. He got to his knees and moved around the wall toward the door, just in time to see a pair of feet disappear around the corner, leaving a smear of blood behind them. They were removing their dead and wounded. He made an attempt to go after them, but the semi-automatic opened up on him for a final time, keeping him pinned down. Somewhere a woman was screaming, and then the sound was lost in the roar of a departing truck. One more pistol shot, and all went quiet.
‘Louis?’
It was Angel.
‘Here,’ he called. ‘In the office.’
‘They’re gone,’ said Angel. ‘But we got one of them alive.’
The east arm of the motel was entirely engulfed in flames. The sound of sirens came from the north. Three women and a man were standing in the lot, having emerged from their rooms in the other parts of the motel. One of the women was staring in horror at the shattered windows and bullet-pocked body of her car.
But Parker, Angel, and Louis were already leaving the motel behind them. Parker drove, Louis in the passenger seat, his gun fixed on the man who sat beside Angel in the back. Benedict’s right elbow was shattered, and he was in considerable pain, but he’d live. He’d been initially reluctant to tell his captors anything, not even his name, but Angel had tapped him on his damaged elbow with the barrel of a Glock, and that seemed to do the trick.
They could have waited for the police to arrive, but Parker knew that their enemies would be shocked and panicked after the failure of the assault on the motel. It was the time to counterattack, and Benedict would provide them with a way in.
The hours of the Cut were numbered.
82
Henkel arrived at Irene Colter’s property to find the house lit up, but no signs of movement inside or out. He took in the woods as his headlights moved across them. He stopped the car, and heard no sound beyond the faint clicking of the turret lights above his head. He’d come in with the roof blazing, because if it was the Cut then he wanted them to know he was on his way, although he couldn’t imagine what business they might have had with Irene, beyond trying to get at him through her.
He climbed from his vehicle. His MP9 was sitting in a holster on his belt, and in his arms he carried one of the department’s Remington 870 shotguns. He called Irene’s name, but received no reply, so he backed up to her porch steps, keeping his eyes on the woods, and knocked. Still nothing. He tried the door, but it was locked, so he moved around the house until he came to the back entrance. This, too, was locked.
He thought for a moment. If she’d done as he asked, then she was still inside. He could see no indications of a break-in, but it was always possible that intruders could have gained access to the house before she’d had a chance to secure it, and locked the doors behind them. He had no choice: he’d have to break the glass to get inside.
He twisted the shotgun so the stock was against the glass, and was about to shatter the pane when he caught a flash of reflected movement. He went right and brought the gun up, his finger already on the trigger. He eased the pressure when he saw Irene standing before him.
‘God,’ he said, ‘don’t sneak up on me like that. Why aren’t you inside like I told you?’
‘It’s complicated,’ she said.
He moved to join her, his attention focused solely on her face, and a man stepped from the shadows to his right and held a pistol about a foot from his head.
Henkel froze.
Maybe this is just a warning, he thought. Maybe they’ll let me live.
The figure to his right shifted position. It was Nestor, one of Brion Moline’s sons from the Cut, and he wasn’t wearing a mask, which meant this wasn’t going to be simply a warning. Henkel had never figured Nestor for a killer, but it seemed that he’d been wrong. It looked like he wasn’t going to live after all, not if Nestor was prepared to show his face like this, but maybe he could still save Irene.
Then she spoke to him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I did kind of like you.’
‘No,’ said Henkel, and in that one syllable he heard all the tiredness and disappointment of a life that had never worked out as he might have hoped, and now seemed destined to end in a manner befitting all that had gone before.
Irene turned to Nestor.
‘Just do it
,’ she said, like Henkel was some old dog that needed to be put down swiftly and painlessly.
Henkel heard the shot. He shouldn’t have, not if it was meant for him, not at that range. Nestor fell to the ground. The bullet had taken him under his raised right arm and passed straight through his torso. He made a low wheezing sound, and a blood bubble sprang from his lips before bursting with his last breath.
Irene stood open-mouthed, staring at the body between them. Henkel didn’t know if she’d ever watched a man die before. Right now, he didn’t much care. He saw Rob Channer advancing across the lawn, and for a moment thought that someone else must have killed Nestor, and now Channer was going to finish the job for the Cut, but he couldn’t make the logic of it work.
Channer kicked the gun away from beside Nestor’s hand, all the time keeping his own weapon fixed on Irene.
‘On your knees!’ he told her.
Irene looked beseechingly at Henkel.
‘They made me do it,’ she said. ‘They threatened me.’
Just do it.
‘You heard the man,’ said Henkel. ‘On your knees.’
She knelt. Channer pushed her down flat on her stomach and searched her before holstering his weapon and cuffing her. When Channer was done, Henkel said to him, ‘I didn’t expect it to be her, and I didn’t expect it to be you.’