“Yeah, but it’s never dull either.”
“No, it’s never dull.”
CHAPTER 12
SAM QUARRY DROVE on rutted roads back to Atlee. The Patriot he’d used to kill Kurt sat on the truck seat next to him. He pulled up in front of his pre–Civil War pile of hand-formed bricks and local stone, as the Alabama dust swirled around the truck’s tires, looking more like simmering heat than dirt fists of the Deep South. He didn’t move for the longest time. He sat there, hands on the wheel, staring at the twenty-ounce Patriot with its firing pin safety mechanism. He finally flicked a thumb across one of its grip pads, trying to shove from his mind what he’d done, by touching the very instrument with which he’d done it.
He’d nearly crashed the Cessna on the flight back. He’d started shaking uncontrollably right after takeoff. Then at barely two hundred feet up he’d caught some wind shear and his wings had rotated nearly vertical. Later, he figured he’d come a few seconds from losing lift altogether before regaining control and soaring upward as the aircraft claimed its buoyancy.
He’d always kept Daryl close to him when his son was growing up. The boy had never been too special in the brains department, his father knew, but he loved him anyway. He was loyal, that boy was. Did whatever his daddy told him to. And what he lacked in intellect he more than made up with dogged determination and attention to detail; attributes he shared with his father. Those traits had worked well for him in the Army. He, Kurt, and Carlos had signed up and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning eight combat medals among them and surviving the worst that the enemy could throw at them, including dozens of IEDs.
Then the trouble had started. Quarry had come down one morning to find the three men eating breakfast in the kitchen at Atlee.
“What you boys doing here?” Quarry had asked. “Thought you had orders to ship back out to the Middle East.”
“Got homesick,” Daryl mumbled, his mouth full of grits and fat bacon, while Kurt just nodded and grinned while he slurped Ruth Ann’s strong coffee. Carlos, always the quiet one, had just stared nervously down at his plate, pecking with his fork at the food.
Quarry slowly sat down in a chair across from them. “Let me ask a stupid question. Does the Army know about this?”
The three men snatched a glance before Daryl said, “Expect they will before too long.” He chuckled.
“So why’d you boys go AWOL?”
“Tired of fighting,” Kurt said.
“Hotter in I-raq than it is in Alabama. And then colder than the moon in winter,” added Daryl. “And we been there four times already. Shot al-Qaeda all the hell up. And the Taliban too.”
“Towelhead freaks,” added Carlos as he fingered his coffee cup.
“But they keep coming back,” said Kurt. “Like Whack-a-Mole. Smack one, nuther muther pops up.”
“Kids come up to you asking for candy and then blow themselves right up,” added Daryl.
“Damndest thing you ever seen, Mr. Quarry,” added Kurt. “Tired of it. That’s the God’s honest truth.”
Daryl had put his fork down and wiped his mouth with the back of his meaty hand. “So we all decided it was time to come on home to Alabama.”
“Sweet home Alabama,” added Kurt with a sly grin.
The MPs had shown up the next day.
“Haven’t seen’em,” Quarry told the stern-faced soldiers. They talked to Ruth Ann, Gabriel, and even Indian Fred. But they learned nothing from any of them. Family took care of family. He didn’t tell the MPs about the old mine, though, because that’s where Kurt, Carlos, and Daryl were hiding out. He’d flown the men up there the night before.
“It’s a federal crime to harbor AWOL soldiers,” the little Hispanic sergeant had told Quarry.
“I served my country in’Nam, Mr. Sergeant Man. Killed me more men than you ever will even in your dreams. And got me a couple Purple Hearts and not even a thank-you from Uncle Sam for my troubles. But I did get a kick in the ass from my country when I got home. No parades for the’Nammers. But if I see my son, I’ll sure do the right thing.” Quarry had given them a little salute and then shut the door in their faces.
That had been two years ago and the Army had come back twice in that time. But roads in and out of this area were few and Quarry always knew they were coming long before they got to Atlee. After that, the Army never came back. Apparently they had more things to worry about than three Alabama boys tired of fighting Arabs seven thousand miles from home, thought Quarry.
Kurt had been like a son to him, almost as much as Daryl. He’d known the boy since he’d been born. Taken him in when his family was wiped out in a fire. He and Daryl were a lot alike.
Carlos had just shown up on his doorstep one morning over a dozen years ago. He hadn’t been much older than Gabriel was now. No family, no money. Just a shirt, a pair of pants, no shoes, but a strong back and a work ethic that didn’t have quit in it. It seemed Quarry had spent his whole life picking up strays.
“Whatcha doing there, Mr. Sam?”
Quarry left his thoughts behind and looked out the truck window. Gabriel was watching him from the front steps. The boy had on his usual faded Wranglers, white T-shirt, and no shoes. He had on an old Atlanta Falcons ball cap Quarry had given him. He wore it backward so his neck wouldn’t get sunburned, or so he’d informed Quarry one day when he’d asked.
“Just thinking, Gabriel.”
“You sure think a lot, Mr. Sam.”
“It’s what adults do. So don’t grow up too fast. Being a kid’s a lot more fun.”
“If you say so.”
“How was school?”
“I like science a lot. But I like reading best of all.”
“So maybe you’ll be a science fiction writer. Like Ray Bradbury. Or that Isaac Asimov.”
“Who?”
“Why don’t you get on and help your ma? She’s always got something to do and not enough help to do it.”
“Okay. Hey, thanks for that stamp. Didn’t have that one.”
“I know you didn’t. Otherwise I wouldn’t have given it to you, son.”
Gabriel walked off and Quarry put the truck in gear and drove it into the barn. He stepped out and slipped the Patriot in his waistband and took the ladder up to the hay storage area above, his boots slipping against the narrow rungs as he arm-pulled himself along. He popped the hayloft doors and looked out, surveying the remains of Atlee. He came up here several times a day to do this. As though if he didn’t check all the time it might disappear on him.
He leaned against the wood frame, smoked a cigarette, and watched the illegals working in his fields to the west. To the east he could see Gabriel helping his mother Ruth Ann tend the kitchen garden where more and more of their food came from. Rural Alabama was right on the cutting edge of the “greening” of America. Out of necessity.
When people are losing their ass in the land of plenty, they do what they have to do to survive.
Quarry carefully put out his smoke so it wouldn’t ignite the dry hay, skipped down the ladder, grabbed a shovel off the rack, marched to the south for nearly a half mile, and came to a stop. He dug the hole deep, which was hard because the soil was so compacted here. But he was a man accustomed to working with his hands and the shovel bit deeper and deeper with each thrust. He dropped the Patriot into the hole and covered it back up, placing a large stone over the disturbed earth.
It was as though he’d just buried someone, but he didn’t say a prayer. Not over a gun, he wouldn’t. Not over anything, actually. Not anymore.
His mother would not have been pleased. A lifelong Pentecostal, she could speak in tongues without the least provocation. She’d taken him to services every Sunday since his brain had worked out the process of memories. As she lay dying one night in the middle of an Alabama gully-washer she’d spoken in tongues to her Lord. Quarry had only been fourteen at the time and it’d scared the shit out of him. Not the tongues, he was used to that. It was the dying part coupled with the scr
eaming in a language he could never understand. It was like his mother knew she was leaving this life and wanted the Lord to know she was coming, only he might be deaf so she had to really belt it out. He thought Jesus was going to drop into his mother’s bedroom any second just to get the poor woman to shut the hell up.
She hadn’t talked to him in her last hours, though he’d sat right beside her, fat tears running down his thin cheeks, telling her he loved her, waiting with all his heart for her to look at him, say something like, “I love you, Sammy.” Or at least, “Goodbye, boy.” Maybe it was somewhere in the tongues, he couldn’t be sure. He’d never learned that language. And then she’d let out one more scream and just quit breathing and that had been that. Not much fanfare, actually. It had amazed him really, how easy it was to die. How straightforward it was to watch someone die.
He’d waited a bit to make sure she was actually dead and not merely resting in between screams to the Lord, then shut her eyes and folded her arms over her chest like he’d seen them do in the movies.
His daddy hadn’t even been there when she’d passed. Quarry found him later that night drunk in bed with the wife of one of his farm workers who was laid up in the hospital after having a reaper tear up his leg. He’d carried him out of the woman’s house over his shoulder and drove him to Atlee. Even though Quarry was only fourteen he was already two inches north of six feet and farmer strong. And he’d been driving since he was thirteen, at least on the back roads of early 1960s rural Alabama.
He’d pulled the old car into the barn, cut the engine, and grabbed a shovel. He’d dug a grave for his father close to where he’d buried the Patriot. He’d walked back to the barn. On the way he’d contemplated how best to kill his old man. He had access to all the guns at Atlee, and there were a lot of them, and he could fire every single one of them with skill. But he figured a blow to the head would be far quieter than a gunshot. He certainly wanted to murder the old adulterer, but he was smart enough not to want to trade his life for the privilege either.
He’d dragged his father out of the car and laid him facedown on the barn’s straw-covered floor. His plan was to deliver the killing blow to the base of the neck, like you would an animal you were planning to do in. As he was readying the sledgehammer to strike his father had abruptly sat up.
“What the hell’s going on, Junior?” he’d slurred, staring at his son through the blur of drunken eye slits.
“Nothing much,” Quarry had said back, his courage fading. He might’ve been as tall as a full-grown man, but he was still only a boy. One look from his daddy was all it took to remind him of that.
“I’m hungry as all get out,” said his father.
Quarry had put down his murder weapon and helped his old man up, supporting him as they made their way to the house. He fed his father and then half carried him upstairs. He kept the light off in the bedroom, undressed the man, and laid him in bed.
When the man woke up the next morning next to his cold, dead wife, Quarry could hear the screams all the way to the milking barn where he sat pulling cow teats for all he was worth. He had laughed so hard, he’d cried.
Quarry walked back to Atlee after burying the gun. It was a fine evening, the sun ending its stay in the sky with a glorious burn right down into the foothills of the Sand Mountain plateau on the southern big toe of the Appalachians. Alabama, he thought, was just about the prettiest place on earth, and Atlee was the finest part of it.
He went to his study and lit a fire though the day had been hot and the night was muggy with the predator mosquitoes already on the prowl for blood.
Blood. He had lots of blood in those coolers. He’d locked them up in the big safe his granddaddy had kept for important documents. It was in the basement next to the old clattering furnace that was rarely needed in this part of the country. The safe had a spin dial that as a child he’d whirled as hard as he could, hoping it would land on the right numbers and reveal its contents. It never had. His father’s last will and testament had finally given Quarry the proper numerical sequence. The thrill just hadn’t been the same.
The fire building up fine, he took the poker, dipped it into the flames, and got it good and hot. He sat back in his chair, rolled up his sleeve, and placed the reddened metal against his skin. He did not cry out, but just about bit through his lower lip. He dropped the poker and looked down at his throbbing arm. Gasping with the pain, he bent his mind to studying the mark the heated metal had left behind. He had made one line with it, a long one. He had three more to go.
He unscrewed a bottle of gin he kept on his desk and drank from it. He poured some on the mark. The blistered skin seemed to swell more with the bite of the alcohol. It looked like a tiny mountain ridge forming after a million-years-ago hiccup of the earth’s bowels. The gin was cheap, all he drank anymore, mostly grain with other crap piled in, locally bottled. That’s all he did anymore: local.
He hadn’t been lying to poor Kurt. There was madness in his family. His daddy clearly had it, and his daddy before him too. Both men had ended up in the state mental hospital where’d they’d finished their days babbling about stuff nobody wanted to hear. The last time Quarry had seen his father alive the man was sitting naked on the dirty floor of a room, smelling worse than an outhouse in August and jabbering on and on about damn LBJ the traitor, and the coloreds, though he had not used such a polite term. It was right then that Quarry had decided his father was not insane, just evil.
He sat back in his chair and studied the flames popping and hissing back at him.
I might be some sorry-ass redneck from nowhere, but I’m gonna get this done. I’m sorry, Kurt. I’m truly sorry, son. One thing I promise you, you won’t die in vain. None of us are gonna die in vain.
CHAPTER 13
THEY TRAVELED to Tuck’s sister-in-law’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, where the kids were staying. John and Colleen Dutton were still in shock and knew very little. Michelle had sat with seven-year-old Colleen and tried her best to coax something out of the girl, but mostly to no avail. She’d been in bed in her room that night. The door had opened, but before she could look, someone grabbed her and then she felt something on her face.
“Like a hand or a cloth?” said Michelle.
“Both,” said Colleen. Tears welled up in her eyes when she said this and Michelle decided not to push it. Both children had been given a relaxant to help keep them calm, but it was obvious that the kids were still in the grips of numbing grief.
Ten-year-old John Dutton had been sleeping in his room too. He had awoken when he felt something near him, but that was all he could remember.
“A smell? A sound?” Sean had suggested.
The boy shook his head.
Neither of them knew for sure where Willa had been in the house. John thought with his mother downstairs. His little sister believed she remembered hearing Willa on the steps going to the second floor a few minutes before Colleen was attacked.
Sean showed them a copy of the markings that had been on their mother’s body but neither of them knew what they meant.
The usual questions of strangers lurking around, odd letters in the mail, or weird telephone calls had gotten them nowhere.
“Would either of you have any idea why your mom might want to see me? Did she talk to you about that?”
They both shook their heads.
“How about your dad? Did either of you see him last night?”
“Daddy was out of town,” said Colleen.
“But he came back last night,” noted Michelle.
“I didn’t see him,” said John and Colleen at the same time.
The little girl desperately wanted to know if they would get Willa back.
“We’ll do everything we can,” Michelle said. “And we’re pretty good at what we do.”
“Now what?” said Michelle as they drove away from the stricken family.
“I got a message from Jane. Tuck will see us.”
“We can talk to everybody, but i
f we don’t have access to the crime scene and the forensics we don’t have much of a shot at this thing.”
“What happened to my little miss sunshine?”
Michelle glanced in the rearview mirror. “It got burned off back at that house. Those kids are devastated.”
“Of course they are. But they’ll be even more devastated if we don’t find Willa.”
Two Secret Service agents were outside Tuck’s hospital room, but they had been notified of Sean and Michelle’s visit and the pair was quickly allowed in. Tuck was sitting up in bed looking groggy. An IV stand was next to the bed with a unit of meds hanging on it and a line running to Tuck’s arm.
Sean introduced Michelle and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry about Pam,” he said.
Tears slid down Tuck’s face. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“We just saw John and Colleen.”
“How are they?” Tuck sat up straighter in his anxiety.
“As best as can be expected,” Sean said diplomatically.
“And Willa? Any news?”
Sean glanced at Michelle and pulled up a chair and sat down next to the bed. “No. What can you tell us about that night?”
Michelle drew closer. “Just take your time. Don’t rush it.”
As it turned out, Tuck could not tell them that much. He’d been in the bedroom when he’d heard a scream. He’d rushed to the door and then something hit him in the head hard.