by Ninie Hammon
Viola’s plan had been the first thing she’d thought of, but the more she organized what was gonna go down, the more sure she was that the plan was solid. Might take a few shootings to get there, but soon’s she aimed her gun at one of them dudes as was in the car, or one of their kin they’d bragged to about it, the person with the gun to his temple would sing like a canary. She was gonna kill them all, soon’s she found out who they was. Ever man jack as was in that car was gonna die this day. She wasn’t gonna tell them that in the beginning, of course. But the triggerman, she had special plans for him.
All she needed was time to execute her way to the information she needed, and these boys was gonna join with her and her boys to make it all happen.
Merl Pickett owed her because she hadn’t ratted him out to the feds that time the DEA found dope on the back of his farm that bordered on hers. She’d told the law she’d seen Bert and Billy Ray Cummings going down the road toward the back of the farm, hadn’t never seen Merl anywhere near it, though.
Bert and Billy Ray was already in federal prison serving mandatory twenty-year sentences for their part in the Cornbread Mafia from Marion County. They’d got sent off right before the feds busted that field so’s it was easy to lay blame on them. They denied it, of course, but didn’t nobody b’lieve ‘em.
Hoyt Wilmer owed her money. A considerable sum if she’d been a bank and added in interest and late fees and the like. He’d bought dope off her to sell and his man run off with the profits. Or so Hoyt said. She’d been meaning to send Obie and Zach around to his house to do some persuading to call in the debt. But that was before the Jabberwock had handed Viola Tackett her own private kingdom on a silver platter.
“I ain’t asking for yore help,” she told the men standing there, armed with rifles … well, Bufford Pettigrew had a shotgun …, “I ain’t asking for nothing. You owe me and this makes us square. We clear on that?”
“Neb said you was gonna shoot people,” Hoyt said and spit out a wad of juice on the grass.
“You got a problem with that?”
“Depends on who the people is.”
“The people is gonna be whoever I decide it is, and if you ain’t in, leave now and take the worthless brother of yours along with you. And you best get ten thousand dollars quick, and it ain’t easy to scrape together that kind of cash, given the way the world is now, so you best have some kinda plan. I will be calling on you and you will have my money ready for me, or …” She didn’t finish, of course. She didn’t have to.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t in, just wanted to know, that’s all.”
“You ain’t gonna have to shoot nobody, if that’s what you’re asking. Well, ‘less somebody tries something you ain’t. You just got to stand there. I’ll do the shooting.”
She hadn’t told them exactly what her plan was, just that she was looking for the drive-by shooters of her girl, and she needed them for “crowd control.”
“So we good?” she asked Hoyt, who nodded, and then she directed the question out to the others. They nodded, too. “All’s you got to do is keep folks in line, don’t let nobody try nothing. Me’n the boys will take care of the rest of it.”
She looked at her watch. The fireworks was s’posed to start at noon.
High noon.
Images played across the screen of Pete Rutherford’s mind that he hadn’t seen in years. Hadn’t allowed himself to see. When he had come home from the South Pacific in 1945, he had done his dead level best to leave behind all that he had seen in the preceding four years. He had actually thought that. As he stepped down off the gangplank of the troopship onto the dock, he had actually made a kind of mental symbolic gesture. He paused for a beat, imagined himself taking off his backpack and leaving it on the dock before he stepped off it onto shore.
All the blood.
Guadalcanal.
The Philippines.
The Solomons.
His best friend from boot camp had died in the battle for Midway Island when a sniper put a bullet right in the center of his forehead.
He had gotten his own first wound on Tarawa, not one severe enough to get him sent home, just went to an army hospital then back to the front.
While he was gone, three of his buddies had been killed.
He had tried very hard to leave the war behind him, as soldiers before him had done and others after him would do. He had tried. But the images had assaulted him, in nightmares in the dark and hallucinations during the day for years.
But he silenced them eventually. Put it behind him.
Pete had been so sympathetic when he’d seen Malachi Tackett crouched in the bus shelter on J-Day because he’d been overwhelmed by a profound been-there, done-that feeling.
He’d never thought he would take up arms against another human being ever again, yet here he stood with his M1 rifle, waiting for Lester to come out of the storage room in the back of his store.
He would be lining up a human being in his sights today, would likely be taking a life. Maybe more than one. But it was either that or let Viola Tackett murder people and he was flat out done with that.
The other images that filled his mind when he shoved images of battle away were those of his daughter. His little girl. He used to call her Tater Head.
Jolene. She was here. Well, here … wherever here was. She had come home, looking for him.
He was staggered by that revelation, surprised by the depth of the feelings he had capped off and sealed after she left home.
He had genuinely believed he would never see her again. After his cancer diagnosis, he had briefly considered getting in touch with her, trying to make amends. Briefly. He hadn’t contacted her, though, because he knew a lost cause when he seen one. He had lost his daughter, had so alienated her by how he had responded to finding out she was a … a what? A ghost hunter, apparently.
He made a humph sound in his throat. As if he gave a Fig Newton about a thing like that now. The cancer, and then the Jabberwock, had burned the scales off Pete Rutherford’s eyes as nothing else could have done. He’d realized then he didn’t care what his daughter did for a living. He had just been a cantankerous old man bent on having his own way, offended that his offspring had chosen to live life on her own terms. Just who did he think he was, getting to decide for another person what was good and right for them? And when he got sick, he thought about trying to tell her that, but he’d pushed her away and now he was just gonna have to live with the consequences of his bullheadedness.
But Jolene had come home! Had come looking for him. If the crazy old man who kept peeing in his pants in the waiting room of the clinic was to be trusted, she and Stuart McClintock and Cotton Jackson were trying to find the people who’d vanished.
Well, if he and Lester and Judd didn’t do something, there’d be a whole lot fewer people to find.
Lester stepped out the door that led to his storage room carrying a Ruger 10/22, so shined up it looked brand new. A sniper rifle. A fine weapon.
“You know, I ain’t fired this thing in a couple of decades,” Lester said.
“It’ll come back to you.” Their eyes met and acknowledged that it was so.
“You got this all figured out, have you?” Lester asked.
“Pretty much.”
Funny how the military was.
Pete hadn’t never had conversation one with Lester Peetree about Vietnam. But it didn’t take half a minute before the both of them was on the same page. They were soldiers, after all. They had civilians to protect. It was that simple.
The bell on the front door of the hardware store jangled and the stout form of Judd Perkins walked through it. He was carrying a rifle, but Judd Perkins wasn’t no soldier.
Chapter Fifteen
Viola went back into the house while the men she’d called on got in their vehicles and cleared out of her driveway. She stood for a time looking at the body of her daughter, laid out there on the couch in the living room, wrapped up in the quilt off Obie’s bed
and that lacy white bedspread that looked kinda like a wedding dress.
Yeah, she was definitely starting to smell bad. They needed to get her into that crypt soon’s they could, but Viola was determined to do it in the right order. She would not lay her baby girl to rest until she found out who’d killed her. Until she had made that person pay for the horrible deed. Pay with pain ten times greater than poor little Essie’d felt when the lowlife shot her.
She turned and crossed the living room. She had left her pistol in a fancy box she’d found on a table beside the front door, made outta all kinda wood she hadn’t never seen the like of. She thought the gun looked right fine in there.
Zach was waiting for her in his snazzy car. He liked playing the role of chauffeur. Mostly, he just liked driving that thing, anywhere and everywhere. He’d drive it from the front door down the driveway to the street to pick up the mail out of the box if she’d let him. He’d just got back from Frogtown. Him and Obie didn’t have no trouble, but Neb had run into some meanness when he pulled up at the Coltrain place in Chicory Hollow. They come out with guns, didn’t ‘xactly threaten him but come as close as you could get ‘thout rubbing elbows. They didn’t trust Viola and let Neb know they would not be coming to her county meeting, thank you very much, to collect gasoline they knew for a pure D fact would not be free like she said.
Might be the truth was that them or one of their kin had driven down Main Street yesterday and shot poor Essie where she sat on the porch, and they didn’t want to face Viola and that was the real reason they wouldn’t come to town. But Viola didn’t think so. They was lots of people had it in for Viola Tackett, had their noses out of joint at her for one thing or another she done to them through the years. But the Coltrains didn’t have no bone to pick with her, least none she could think of. They was just ornery people was all. Wasn’t no reason for them to have come roaring down the street with guns blazing, intent on causing harm to Viola and her kin.
Besides, the family didn’t have nothing but that big old Chevy Malibu held together with duct tape and Bondo. That car didn’t have no muffler and you coulda heard them coming a mile out. She’d asked and Neb’d said he didn’t see nor hear nothing he recognized. Nothing at all. So unless they borrowed somebody else’s wheels, it couldn’t have been the Coltrains.
She’d sent Merl Pickett and the Scullys on ahead to get in position, all casual-like. She crossed the yard to where Zach was parked, revving his engine, and kicked something in the tall grass that still hadn’t got mowed yet. She glanced down at it. Something made outta leather with what looked like catsup smeared on it. Then she noticed that Obie was standing beside the door of his truck, arguing with Neb.
“You boys come on now,” she called out.
“Neb won’t come,” Obie said. “Said he was staying here.” She stopped, changed direction and walked up to where her oldest son stood beside the open door of Obie’s stolen black pickup truck. In truth, the boy didn’t look good. White as a sheet. No, actually his face looked kinda green. Like maybe he was gonna upchuck and lose his breakfast.
“S’matter with you, boy?” she demanded, and he looked at her with such hound dog eyes she wanted to look away.
“Nuthin’. I just don’t feel good’s all. I’m sick.”
He did look sick, actually hadn’t looked right since she found him staggering under the weight of his fat sister, carrying her body to the truck in back to get her help. Was actin’ peculiar, too. Middle of the night last night she seen him out in the front yard with a flashlight, just wandering around, said he couldn’t sleep. She made him come back in the house and go to bed. Might be he was sick then, too. But sick or well, he was coming with her.
“I don’t care if you’s knocking on the Pearly Gates with a jackhammer. Get in that truck, you’re coming with me.”
He didn’t argue, just drooped his head all mournful-like and went around to the passenger side of Obie’s stolen pickup truck.
If his stomach was bothering him, he was likely to puke for sure at the scene she was imagining taking place on the street in front of the school. They was gonna be lots of blood, she was sure of it. Screaming and carrying on and the like. It wasn’t a place for somebody whose stomach wasn’t too settled to begin with. She come within an inch of telling Neb to stay home, but her thoughts got hung on the nail in her head that had been derailing every train of thought she’d put together since yesterday afternoon, when she sat at her kitchen table staring at a photograph that coulda been Rusty Sheridan … well, ‘cept for the black hair.
Ever time she thought about it, the strangest stew of emotions took over. She couldn’t wait until that boy come around, because she was almost sure he had pale blue eyes like his daddy. And she sure did want to see that for a fact.
She let that go, however, and concentrated on the job she had before her. She needed to get her girl in the ground and the murderer suitably punished before she had any space in her head for more. But soon’s she did, soon’s she had all her ducks beak to tail feathers, well … she’d go get her rightful heir. She’d settle up with his mama — people was gonna pitch a fit but wasn’t nothing for it but to do what she had to do. And more importantly with that McCormick woman. She’d get rid of them all, fix everything that wasn’t right in her whole life in one grand sweep.
Then she’d sit back in the lap of luxury in the Tackett House and enjoy raising her grandson to be a good, obedient boy like his father never had been.
“Best get this outta the way first thing,” Pete Rutherford said. “Me and Lester’s soldiers. We seen … we been in battle. We’ve taken a human life. This ain’t no deer or elk you gonna be shooting, Judd. You take up arms with us today, and you gonna have to kill people. Likely more than one. Straight up — can you do it?”
The man didn’t mince words.
Six months ago, a month ago … shoot, even a week ago, Judd Perkins woulda balked at a question like that. Could he kill a man? Put the crosshairs of his sight on another human being and pull the trigger?
He’d thought about it all the way into town, trying to get his arms around the enormity of what he was preparing to do. He’d backed up from it at first, had been so shocked by what Pete told him, he’d stammered agreement without even considering the ramifications. Judd was on the phone tree and Daniel Hunt had called late yesterday evening and said Judd had ought to go into town at noon today because Viola Tackett was signing people up for free gasoline. Him and Dan had talked about that — Viola Tackett giving out something free … riiiiiight. They was some kinda catch to it, they always was with a woman vicious as she was. But even with whatever the catch was, it was still gasoline. And the tank on Judd’s truck was darn near empty. He’d gone down the road to Bobby Ray Blaylock’s place, who hadn’t been home since the week before Memorial Day. Wherever it was Bobby Ray’d gone, he’d drove his only car to get there, but he had a tractor in the barn, and Judd’d been able to siphon out enough gasoline from it to fill two five-gallon cans. Judd was burning through that fast, though, going back and forth into the Middle of Nowhere helping to sit with E.J. When it run out, then what? Dan was in the same shape as Judd. Everybody was. So him and Dan’d finally figured that it didn’t really matter what the real deal was, what kind of bait-and-switch Viola was gonna pull on ‘em once she got everybody together. Whatever the price was, they’d all have to suck it up and pay. It was either that or walk.
But then Pete’d told him gasoline didn’t have nothing to do with why Viola was gathering up folks in town. Judd had asked Pete to repeat himself when he heard the real reason Viola’d called the meeting, made sure he heard Pete right. Wasn’t no mistaking his words the second time around, though — Viola Tackett intended to start shooting people, random people, one after the other until she found out who’d killed her daughter. The words had knocked the wind out of Judd and he’d agreed to come help just as a kinda knee-jerk reaction. Of course, he’d help stop a thing like that from happening. Anybody would.
Pete’d said he’d need extra ammunition, that Judd’d probably oughta pack a full box of shells, maybe two because there was no telling how many … people he might have to shoot. That had brought him up short. He’d froze then, felt a queasy feeling in his belly, then slowly, kinda in a fog, he’d poured the shells out of the box into his hand.
He had a vest that he wore when he went hunting. It had padding on the right shoulder for recoil, rifle and handgun magazine pockets, shotgun shell holders — even had a handgun holster. It was hanging on a hook beside the gun rack. Judd stood there looking at it.
A hunting vest.
Then he turned away. Wasn’t gonna put on no hunting vest like he was just going out into the woods to bag a deer so he could fill the freezer with venison steaks for Doreen and the girls. He wasn’t going hunting.
He’d emptied the shells into his hand then and filled up the pockets of his overalls, went out to his truck and headed into the Ridge with his thoughts skidding around in his mind like he was trying to drive ‘em on black ice.
Could he really shoot somebody? Kill somebody? Did Judd Perkins have the courage to do a thing like that? Then he’d thought about E.J., coming up with a plan to save the lives of Judd’s precious granddaughters — a plan that meant E.J. was going to get ripped apart by a rabid dog.
