Graveyard of the Gods

by Richard Newman

  Gene checked to make sure he was out of view from anyone looking in from the kitchen sink window. If Zesty hadn’t grown two feet since he’d last seen him, he was probably out of sightline. Gene focused again on the door. In less than a minute he watched the handle turn very slowly, first counter-clockwise then clockwise, but he didn’t give it any more time to turn. With his right hand he gunned his engine and came crashing through and over the door, which came down on top of Zesty, knocking him flat. Gene hit the doorframe with his left handle, which turned his wheel a bit, but he straightened out and rode out over the door. Zesty yelled beneath him, over the roaring engine, while Gene headed directly for the cornfield behind the house.

  As he plunged into the wall of cornstalks, he may have heard shots and even thought he could feel bullets whizzing past him, like when he sat atop his tank in Iraq, but he had no way of knowing if there were any shots or which killer would have fired at him, and it could just have easily been the rain or his imagination in overdrive. What he did feel, once again, were the cornstalks slap-slap-slapping his shoulders and visor as he tore through the muddy field toward Glendale Road. Once on solid pavement, he turned southwest toward he had no idea where.

  SIXTEEN

  AS GENE SPED DOWN Glendale Road, his mind raced. How the hell could Jimmy Tosti and Zesty have found him? Surely the rain had washed away most of his tracks, especially by the time he’d pulled into the driveway of the dismal banana house. He also reflected that he hadn’t seen any moving cars as he was leaving Metropolis. Looking back in his rearview mirror and seeing nothing but a long stretch of rainy, empty country highway, Gene pulled around a curve at the bottom of a dip and stopped his bike. He started at the front fender and worked his way back, searching every wet inch of his BMW 1200 until he found a small GPS locator, about the size of a bar of soap, stuck in between his seat and saddlebag.

  His first instinct was to throw the device into the soybean field just off the highway, but he knew the search wouldn’t end here, and Jimmy Tosti and Zesty wouldn’t return to Dickie Shoats at Five Star with their tails between their legs. They knew where he lived and where he worked and how to contact him, and they wouldn’t rest until they laid him to rest. Gene decided his best bet was to use their own GPS against them, and he quickly hopped back on his bike and sped off to work on a plan.

  The first place that occurred to him was a ranger’s station in the Garden of the Gods recreation area, deep in the Shawnee National Forest. Because of its stone walls and faux battlements, he and Miller called it The Castle when they were young and had as much interest in climbing its rough-hewn, irregular stone exterior as the many rock formations along the trails that sprawled and twisted away from it. The building had small windows deeply set into the walls, a steep sloped roof, and even a small round decorative turret. It also sat thirty to forty yards from a steep cliff which looked out toward large rock formations with unimaginative names like Mushroom Rock and Anvil Rock. Gene remembered most of the formations looking like huge petrified camels with humps stretching out a hundred feet from the cliffs. Others looked like drizzled sandcastles kids make on the beach and reached up from the base of the bluffs hundreds of feet into the air.

  Gene hadn’t visited Garden of the Gods since he was a teenager, but he had ridden his bike near the area many times. He figured the ranger station was about thirty miles from where he was now, but that it would take at least forty-five to fifty minutes because of the roads. He had an advantage over Jimmy Tosti in that he knew the area well from his trips to the Ste. Genevieve BMW dealer. The way there would be mostly narrow winding roads, some in poor condition and parts paved with gravel, so it would be almost impossible for Tosti and Zesty to catch up with him until he stopped. He tacked north until he connected with 145, near Eddyville, then drove northeast through the shriveled, lifeless town of Delwood, then south on 34 through Rudement and Herod. The rain had stopped when he pulled into the completely empty recreation area just before 6:00 a.m.

  The Castle was much smaller than he remembered. He’d never seen the inside, as the building was always locked, but it couldn’t have stretched more than twenty feet long. Gene eased his bike down the path, pulled up to the door, and got off. He would have to work quickly, as Jimmy Tosti had no doubt gained on him during the stretch of 145. The green door was locked, but it was an old lock, and Gene opened it easily with the small awl on his pocket knife. The building was dark inside, but he could make out an old metal desk and a cheap table, one of the long ones with the foldout legs. On it were some first aid kits, coils of rope, snakebite kits, and several thick flashlights almost the size of milk jugs. A stretcher leaned in the corner, and several large water bottles lay nearby. Gene wheeled his bike inside, removed the Smith & Wesson from the saddlebag, then walked out and closed the door, leaving the GPS exactly where he found it.

  To his right an asphalt path snaked over a little hill and then down to the main recreation area where most of the limestone formations stretched out from the cliffs and bluffs. Straight in front of him was a small, disheveled grassy lawn which ran into the edge of sparse woods—a few trees but mostly saplings, brush and tall weeds, thistles, mayapples, ferns, and honeysuckle. It was probably full of snakes and teeming with chiggers and ticks, which Gene especially hated, but he pushed his way in.

  The ground was soft and spongy, almost swampy, from all the rain. Gene found some large sticks and, after removing his SIG and sticking it in his belt for the time being, took off his coat and helmet. He angled two branches into the ground and draped his coat over them, so as to look like a person hiding partially behind a tree and partially in the brush, tall weeds, and vines, then put the helmet over a third stick between them. He quickly walked over to the asphalt path to see how it looked, then came back to his motorcycle dummy and made a few angle adjustments. Hoping for the best, he left it alone.

  Gene walked to another spot in the woods, squatted down, and gauged several sightlines before picking one. He grabbed handfuls of vines and short, thin trees, mostly sassafras saplings with their friendly little mitten and three-fingered leaves. He covered himself with them the best he could, took a deep breath, and lay down in the wet earth. He immediately felt himself sinking into the ground. The icy water pooled around him, seeping into his pants and underwear and flooding the depression he was making. He had never done anything like this in Operation Desert Storm, but he had trained in wet, wooded areas many times near Camp Pendleton. He was shaking with cold, fear, and adrenaline and hoped the leaves he was using for camouflage weren’t rustling. While lying down, he smeared some of the wet black loam on his forehead, nose, cheeks, ears, and shiny bald dome. Then he waited. Hurry Up and Wait: the unofficial military motto. Gene waited for what seemed like an hour, though he knew it wasn’t, telling himself to be disciplined, not to move despite the cold water that soaked his clothes and made them cling to his cold flesh. He forced himself not to brush away the creeping things, both real and imagined, that he felt on his neck, in his armpits, on his legs, and not to scratch the hundreds of itches that assaulted his skin—from the rain and mud as well as from the ticks, gnats, chiggers, and mosquitoes, both real and imagined, that were searching for warm blood now that the rain had finally stopped.

  On top of a series of hills, cliffs, and bluffs, the altitude at Garden of the Gods was higher than much of the rest of the state, and mist clung to the tops of trees and shrubs. To his left Gene could see the top part of the camel formation sticking up over the hill, and perhaps part of the tip of the anvil, too. In the morning mist and drizzle they looked flat, not round, more like gravestones than mushrooms or camel humps. Gene wondered briefly whose gravestones they’d be—his or his enemies—before he snatched the thoughts out of his mind and returned his focus.

  He remembered when Miller had asked if he’d killed anyone in Kuwait. Gene hadn’t answered, partially because he didn’t want Miller’s judgment, but also because he wasn’t sure. From his tank on the front lines
he had heard and felt bullets whizzing over his head, some surely meant for him, and he had fired back into the array of dunes and sand trenches and enemy Republican Guard tanks, but he wasn’t sure if his bullets had killed anybody. He saw men go down, but Iraqis had been going down all over the place before they fled or surrendered. They were too far away to be certain. At any rate, he’d never shot anyone as close as he would have to today if he were going to get out of Garden of the Gods alive. He had shot blackbirds and deer close up, quail and squirrel as well, and he’d certainly killed his share of hogs, but he wondered how he might feel shooting people point blank and knowing that it was his bullet, not a fellow soldier’s, that had killed them, the enemy. The instinctive hatred that had been brewing inside him the last few hours made him hope he had a chance to find out. He hated both of these fuckers and wanted them dead.

  Gene reminded himself again to focus and put these thoughts out of his mind, even his anger. He imagined a huge fist grabbing his thoughts like weeds and plucking them out of his head and throwing them over the cliff behind him. He closed his eyes and listened to the rain dripping from the trees above him, the chirping of insects in the grass, birds starting to twitter, a whip-poor-will, either a woodpecker pecking or a tree limb, heavy with rain, groaning under the weight. To stay sharp and awake, he strained his ears to hear how far away he could hear—drops of water dripping further and further, falling out over the bluffs. And then he thought he heard a car door.

  Gene held the Smith & Wesson straight out in front of him, the SIG next to him, dry on a pile of leaves. It seemed like at least another hour before Zesty came cautiously down the path, his gun drawn and held out in front of him in one hand, not up in the air like in TV shows. Gene couldn’t tell if he was bruised or injured from the door he’d knocked onto him. Zesty slid close to the stone building, not quite hugging the wall, cautiously peered around the corner, and came to the door. Back to the wall, right hand holding his gun, Zesty reached out his left to grab the doorknob, and that was when Gene pulled the trigger, twice. Zesty went down, and Gene was pretty sure both shots had hit their mark: one in the heart and one in the head.

  Jimmy Tosti was nowhere to be seen. Gene felt his cell phone vibrate in his back left pocket. No doubt it was Tosti calling to taunt him and make him reveal his position. Gene let it vibrate. Then Gene heard two shots to his left and saw Tosti jostle himself from one tree to the other. He was to Gene’s immediate left, coming down a hill, much closer than he’d anticipated. He must have moved in when Gene was fixing his sights on Zesty. Tosti stepped out from behind an oak and fired another shot, but it wasn’t close to where he was lying. Gene took advantage of the opening and shot him in the chest. Tosti stood there, dropped his gun, and made a long “Fffffff” sound, then he fell face down. Gene couldn’t tell if Tosti was going say “Farmer Brown” or “fuck” or if he was merely trying to breathe with a hole in his chest. He appeared to be dead, but Gene wasn’t taking any chances. Shaking with adrenaline, he pried himself out of the mire and walked stiffly over to Zesty, his drenched clothes clinging to his body, his muscles cold and stiff.

  He picked up Zesty’s gun, a Ruger .45, with the hanky from his right back pocket, walked over to Jimmy Tosti, and from twenty feet put three more bullets in his skull, back, and right leg from Zesty’s gun then fired off two or three extra into the air. Then he grabbed Tosti’s gun, a classic old Beretta M-9, and fired two bullets into the front of Zesty. Filling the two men with bullets helped quell the adrenaline shakes, but his stomach was boiling over with acid and butterflies. Gene spit, cursing his stomach for constantly betraying him. One of these two had killed his brother, but he felt no victory and no sense of vengeance—nothing but shaky hands, a burning gut, and a sour taste in his mouth that he couldn’t spit out. Gene made sure to press the guns back in the owners’ hands to make more fingerprints, then dropped the guns back where he first picked them up.

  Gene walked back through the wooded area to pick up his SIG, still on the ground, and to retrieve his helmet and jacket which he saw now had a hole in the left shoulder that went clear through the hard plastic shoulder pad and then out the chest and through the sleeve of the other side. His dummy had worked, despite ruining his jacket, but at least he hadn’t been in it. He donned his bullet-pierced jacket and hoped to a god that he almost never believed in that this staging would work, that investigators wouldn’t notice three different kinds of bullets in the two bodies, that the scene would look like the two educators had shot each other.

  On his way back to the ranger’s station, Gene walked past Jimmy Tosti for one last look. He couldn’t have said he and Tosti were friends, but he had liked him well enough in the military—and even some of their business interactions over the years. He was lying on his side, but Gene could see the left side of his face, which almost looked like a half smile or smirk but was probably a last wince in pain. He hadn’t noticed before, but a silver cross with a gold rope design at the apex spilled out from Tosti’s neck. Gene was surprised that, as he looked down on the dead body he’d filled with bullets, he felt absolutely nothing—no remorse, no sadness, not even a sense of relief. He wondered for a moment if he had become a cold-blooded killer, like Jimmy Tosti had become or maybe always was, or if his lack of feelings was a survival instinct, necessary and absolute, something far beyond the euphemism they all used: business. But this was serious business, not mere money business. It was the business of life and death, and as limestone formations stretched out of the dampness and steam like ageless monuments, Gene hoped they marked the victory not of a cold-blooded murderer but a ruthless survivor.

  He didn’t have time to ponder that distinction here. He walked back along the path to the stone building, wheeled his mud- and cornstalk-smeared bike out, and pushed it up the path to the parking lot, propping it up a moment to toss the wiped down GPS device through the open window onto the back floor of Zesty’s white Cutlass. He was about ready to start up his bike when he remembered Tosti’s cell phone. His was the last number Tosti had called. Gene worried that hikers might be arriving any minute to the area, but he hurried back to Tosti’s body and found the phone in its little cell phone holster and put it in his pocket before driving out of the parking lot.

  Outside the park gates he saw a pile of stones leftover from the Garden of the Gods sign, framed in stone, and the decorative stone fence holding up rustic-looking log rails. He took the cell phone out of his jacket, smashed it to tiny pieces against two large rocks—reminding him of crushing a bug dried on a windowsill—and scattered the pieces into the woods. He took a long swig of water from his saddlebag, popped two more Tums, then got on his bike. A white dust-covered Jeep Cherokee turned into the recreational area as he drove away, the first civilian car he’d seen all morning. The morning sun had burned away the remaining mist clinging in the treetops, and now the humidity rose in waves of steam off the crumbling asphalt highway. Gene headed for home as the two Tums turned to mush on the back of his tongue.

  SEVENTEEN

  GENE FOLLOWED HIGHWAY 34 to 145 then back to Highway 1, feeling the cool wind worm its way in through the four bullet holes in his jacket. He passed Norris City without stopping to visit his mother as he usually did when he hit this junction. He continued up Highway 1 into Carmi, past the Buy-Lo, past the Dairy Queen, and past Vongotten Funeral Home without so much as a snort.

  He pulled up onto his own property, half expecting carnage and retaliation, but he knew that would have been impossible so early. It would almost certainly come later, and he didn’t want to wait around for it.

  Gene could hardly believe it had only been a day, a little over twenty-four hours, since he’d pulled Miller’s dead body out of the hog pen, but seeing everything exactly as he’d left it brought him immediately back to this world. This was his world, his land, and even though nothing had been touched since yesterday morning, it was a changed world, exactly the same and eerily different.

  He first went to Pretty Girl,
who was barking and jumping up and down against her large cage.

  “Hey, Pretty Girl! You miss me?”

  He filled up her bowl with food and refilled her water dish from the tap he’d run out to her area, then came back to slap her strong flanks and scratch her behind her ears.

  “I’d almost forgotten about you!” he said, as a joke, but then realized he wasn’t joking. He hoped he wasn’t turning into his mother.

  Gene next walked down to the hog shed and dropped his jacket into the fire barrel on top of Miller’s wet shoes and went inside. The hogs had heard him coming and they stirred and chomped and snorted hungrily as he walked into the thick, stinky air. Excited, they clustered close to the rail, reminding him of sharks in the Jacques Cousteau specials he and Miller watched as kids.

  Miller still sat in the metal chair where he’d positioned him, but the Over/Under had fallen on the ground and he’d slumped further down. His eyes had grown fuzzy, not shiny anymore, and they stared off and up, looking to Gene like they stared into the horizon of a completely different world. The rigor mortis had softened, and he moved easily over Gene’s shoulder.