The White Road

by John Connolly

  It was Phil’s fault, in the end. He was getting off the girl, breathing hard, his face turned away from her, looking toward her sister and her sister’s ruined face, the import of what they were doing gradually dawning on him now that he had spent himself, when suddenly he felt the impact at his groin and he tumbled sideways, the shock already transforming itself into a burning at the pit of his stomach. Then Melia was on her feet and running away from the swamp, heading east toward the Larousse tract and the main road beyond.

  Mobley was the first to head after her, then Foster. Elliot, torn between taking his turn with the girl on the ground or stopping her sister, stood unmoving for a time before running after his friends. Grady and Earl were already pushing at each other, joshing as they fought for their turn with Addy.

  The purchase of the karst had been an expensive mistake for the Larousse family. The land was honeycombed by underwater streams and caves, and they had almost lost a truck down a sinkhole following a collapse before they discovered that the limestone deposits weren’t even big enough to justify quarrying. Meanwhile, successful mines were being dug in Cayce, about twenty miles up-river, and Wynnsboro, up 77 toward Charlotte, and then there were the tree huggers protesting at the potential threat to the swamp. The Larousses turned their attentions in other directions, leaving the land as a reminder to themselves never to be caught out like that again.

  Melia passed some fallen, rusted fencing, and a bullet-riddled NO TRESPASSING sign. Her feet were torn and bleeding, but she kept moving. There were houses beyond the karst, she knew. There would be help for her there, help for her sister. They would come for them and take them to safety and-

  She heard the men behind her, closing rapidly. She peered back, still running, and suddenly her toes were no longer on solid ground but were suspended over some deep, dark place. She teetered on the brink of the sinkhole, smelling the filthy, polluted water below, then her balance failed her and she plummeted over the edge. She landed with a splash far below, emerging seconds later choking and coughing, the water burning her eyes, her skin, her privates. She looked up and saw the three men silhouetted against the stars. With slow strokes, she swam for the edges of the hole. She tried to find a handhold, but her fingers kept slipping on the stone. She heard the men talking, and one of them disappeared. Her arms and legs moved slowly as she kept herself afloat in the dank, viscous waters. The burning was getting worse now, and she had trouble keeping her eyes open. From above, there came a new light. She stared up in time to see the rag flare and then the gasoline can was falling, falling…

  The sinkholes had, over the years, become a dumping ground for poisons and chemicals, the waste infecting the water supply and slowly, over time, entering the Congaree itself, for all of these hidden streams ultimately connected with the great river. Many of the substances dumped in the hole were dangerous. Some were corrosives, others weedkillers. Most, though, had one thing in common.

  They were highly flammable.

  The three men stepped back hurriedly as a pillar of flame shot up from the depths of the hole, illuminating the trees, the broken ground, the abandoned machinery, and their faces, shocked and secretly delighted at the effect they had achieved.

  One of them wiped his hands on the remains of the old sheet he had torn for use as a wick, trying to rid himself of the worst of the gasoline.

  “Fuck her,” said Elliot Norton. He wrapped the rag around a stone and tossed it into the inferno. “Let’s go.”

  I said nothing for a time. Poveda was tracing unknowable patterns on the tabletop with his index finger. Elliot Norton, a man whom I had considered a friend, had participated in the rape and burning of a young girl. I stared at Poveda, but he was intent upon his finger patterns. Something had broken inside Phil Poveda, the thing that had allowed him to continue living after what they had done, and now Phil Poveda was drowning in the tide of his recollection.

  I was watching a man go insane.

  “Go on,” I said. “Finish it.”

  “Finish her,” said Mobley. He was looking down at Earl Larousse, who was kneeling beside the prone woman, buttoning his pants. Earl’s brow furrowed.

  “What?”

  “Finish her,” repeated Mobley. “Kill her.”

  “I can’t do that,” said Earl. He sounded like a little boy.

  “You fucked her quick enough,” said Mobley. “You leave her here and somebody finds her, then she’ll talk. We let her go, she’ll talk. Here.” He picked up a rock and tossed it at Earl. It struck him painfully on the knee and he winced, then rubbed at the spot.

  “Why me?” he whined.

  “Why any of us?” asked Mobley.

  “I’m not doing it,” said Earl.

  Then Mobley pulled a knife from beneath the folds of his shirt. “Do it,” said Mobley, “or I’ll kill you instead.”

  Suddenly, the power in the group shifted and they understood. It had been Mobley all along: Mobley who had led them; Mobley who had found the pot, the LSD; Mobley who had brought them to the women; and Mobley who had ultimately damned them. Maybe that had been his intention all along, thought Phil later: to damn a group of rich, white boys who had patronized him, insulted him, then taken him under their wing when they saw what he could procure for them just as they would surely abandon him when his usefulness came to an end. And of them all, it was Larousse who was the most spoiled, the most cosseted, the weakest, the most untrustworthy; and so it would fall to him to kill the girl.

  Larousse began to cry. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t make me do this.”

  Mobley, unspeaking, lifted the blade and watched it gleam in the moonlight. Slowly, with trembling hands, Larousse picked up the rock.

  “Please,” he said, one last time. To his right, Phil turned away, only to feel Mobley’s hand wrench him around.

  “No, you watch. You’re part of it, you watch it end. Now-” He turned his attention back to Larousse. “Finish her, you chickenshit fuck. Finish her, you fucking pretty boy, unless you want to go back to your daddy and have to tell him what you’ve done, cry on his shoulder like the little fucking faggot that you are, beg him to make it go away. Finish her. Finish her!”

  Larousse’s whole body was shaking as he raised the rock then brought it down, with minimal force, on the girl’s face. Still there came a cracking sound, and she moaned. Larousse was howling now, his face convulsed with fear, the tears rolling down his cheeks, streaking through the dirt that had accumulated on them during the rape of the girl. He raised the rock a second time, then brought it down harder. This time, the crack was louder. The rock came up once more, then down, faster now, and Larousse was making a high-pitched mewling sound as he struck at the girl again and again and again, lost in the frenzy of it, blood-spattered, until hands reached out for him and they dragged him from her body, the rock still grasped between his fingers, his eyes huge and white in his red face.

  The girl on the ground was long dead.

  “You did good,” said Mobley. The knife was gone. “You’re a regular killer, Earl.” He patted the sobbing man on the shoulder. “A regular killer.”

  “Mobley took her away,” said Poveda. “People were coming, drawn by the fire, and we had to leave. Landron’s old man was a gravedigger in Charleston. He’d opened a grave in Magnolia the day before, so Landron and Elliot dumped her there and used some of the earth to cover her. They buried the guy on top of her the next day. He was the last in his family. Nobody was ever going to be digging up the plot again.” He swallowed. “At least, they weren’t until Landron’s body got dumped there.”

  “And Melia?” I asked.

  “She was burned alive. Nothing could have survived that blaze.”

  “And nobody knew about this? You told no one else about what you’d done?”

  He shook his head. “It was just us. They looked for the girls, but they never found them. Rains came and washed everything away. As far as anybody knew, they’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.
<
br />   “But somebody found out,” he concluded. “Somebody’s making us pay. Marianne was killed. James took his own life. Grady got his throat cut. Mobley was murdered, then Elliot. Someone is hunting us down, punishing us. I’m next. That’s why I had to get my affairs in order.”

  He smiled.

  “I’m leaving it all to charity. You think that’s a good thing to do? I think so. I think it’s a good thing.”

  “You could go to the police. You could tell them what you did.”

  “No, that’s not the way. I have to wait.”

  “I could go to the police.”

  He shrugged. “You could, but I’ll just say you made it all up. My lawyer will have me out in a matter of hours, if they even bother to take me in at all, then I’ll be back here, waiting.”

  I stood.

  “Jesus will forgive me,” said Poveda. “He forgives us all. Doesn’t He?”

  Something flickered in his eyes, the last dying thrashing of his sanity before it sank beneath the waves.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if there’s that much forgiveness in the universe.”

  Then I left him.

  The Congaree. The spate of recent deaths. The link between Elliot and Atys Jones. The T-bar in Landron Mobley’s chest, and the smaller version of it that hung from the neck of the man with the damaged eyes.

  Tereus. I had to find Tereus.

  * * *

  The old man still sat on the worn steps of the rooming house, smoking his pipe and watching the traffic go by. I asked him for the number of Tereus’s room.

  “Number 8, but he ain’t there,” he told me.

  “You know, I think you may be bad luck for me,” I said. “Whenever I come here, Tereus is gone but you’re taking up porch space.”

  “Thought you’d be glad to see a familiar face.”

  “Yeah, Tereus’s.”

  I walked past him and headed up the stairs. He watched me go.

  I knocked on the door to 8, but there was no reply. From the rooms at either side I could hear competing radios playing, and stale cooking smells clung to the carpets and the walls. I tried the handle and it turned easily, the door opening onto a room with a single unmade bed, a punch-drunk couch and a gas stove in one corner. There was barely enough room between the stove and the bed for a thin man to squeeze by and look out of the small, grime-caked window. To my left was a toilet and shower stall, both reasonably clean. In fact, the room might have been threadbare, but it wasn’t dirty. Tereus had done his best to make something of it: new drapes hung from the plastic rail at the window, and a cheap framed print of roses in a vase hung on the wall. There was no TV, no radio, no books. The mattress had been torn from the bed and thrown in a corner, and clothes were scattered around the room, but I guessed that whoever had trashed the place had found nothing. Anything of value Tereus owned he kept elsewhere, in his true home.

  I was about to leave when the door opened behind me. I turned to find a big, overweight black man in a bright shirt blocking my way out. He had a cigarette in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. Behind him, I could see the old man puffing on his pipe.

  “Can I help you with something?” asked the man with the bat.

  “You the super?”

  “I’m the owner, and you’re trespassing.”

  “I was looking for somebody.”

  “Well, he ain’t here, and you got no right to be in his place.”

  “I’m a private detective. My name is-”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn what your name is. You just get out of here now before I have to defend myself against an unprovoked assault.”

  The old man with the pipe chuckled. “Unprovoked assault,” he echoed. “Thass good.” He shook his head in merriment and blew out a puff of smoke.

  I walked to the door and the big man stood to one side to let me pass. He still filled most of the doorway and I had to breathe in deeply to squeeze by. He smelled of drain cleaner and Old Spice. I paused at the stairs.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “How come his door is unlocked?”

  The man’s face creased in puzzlement. “You didn’t open it?’

  “No, it was open when I got here, and somebody had gone through his things.”

  The owner turned to the man with the pipe. “Anybody else asking after Tereus?”

  “No, sir, just this man.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to make any trouble,” I continued. “I just need to talk to Tereus. When was the last time that you saw him?”

  “Few days ago,” said the owner, relenting. “Round about eight, after he finished over at the club. He had a pack with him, said he wouldn’t be back for a couple of days.”

  “And the door was locked then?”

  “Watched him lock it myself.”

  Which meant that somebody had entered the building since the death of Atys Jones and had probably done what I had just done: gone into the apartment, either to find Tereus himself or something connected with him.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Yeah, don’t mention it.”

  “Unprovoked assault,” said the pipe smoker again. “Thass funny.”

  The late afternoon deviants were already assembled in LapLand by the time I arrived, among them an elderly man in a torn shirt who rubbed his hand up and down his beer bottle in a manner that suggested he spent too much time alone thinking about women, and a middle-aged guy in a tatty business suit, his tie already at half-mast, and a shot glass before him. His briefcase lay at his feet. It had fallen open and now stood, slack-jawed, on the floor. It was empty. I wondered when he would pluck up the courage to tell his wife that he’d lost his job, that he’d been spending his days watching pole dancers or low-priced afternoon movies, that she didn’t have to iron his shirts anymore because, hell, he didn’t have to wear a shirt. In fact, he didn’t even have to get out of bed in the mornings if he didn’t feel like it and hey, you got a problem with that then don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

  I found Lorelei sitting at the bar, waiting for her turn to dance. She didn’t look too happy to see me, but I was used to that. The bartender made a move to intercept me, but I lifted a finger.

  “My name’s Parker. You got a problem, you call Willie. Otherwise, back off.”

  He backed off.

  “Slow afternoon,” I said to Lorelei.

  “They’re always slow,” she said, her head turning away from me to signal her lack of interest in engaging me in conversation. I figured that she’d taken an earful from her boss for talking too much the last time I visited, and didn’t want to be seen to repeat her mistake. “The only cash these guys got are nickels and dimes and Canadian quarters.”

  “Well then, I guess you’ll be dancing for the love of your art.”

  She shook her head and stared back at me over her shoulder. It wasn’t a friendly look.

  “You think you’re funny? Maybe even think you got ‘charm’? Well, let me tell you something: you don’t. What you got I see here every night, in every guy who sticks a dollar bill in the crack of my ass. They come in, they think they’re better than me, they maybe even got some fantasy that I’ll look at them and I won’t want to take their money, I’ll just want to take them home and fuck them till their lights go out. Well, that just ain’t gonna happen, and if I don’t put out for free for them, I sure ain’t gonna put out for free for you, so if you want something from me, you show me green.”

  She had a point. I put a fifty on the bar, but kept my finger firmly fixed on the nose.

  “Call me cautious,” I said. “Last time, I think you reneged on our agreement.”

  “You got to talk to Tereus, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I had to go through your boss to get to him. Literally. Where is Tereus?”

  Her lips thinned. “You really got it in for that guy, don’t you? You ever get tired of pressuring people?”

  “Listen t
o me,” I said. “I’d prefer not to be here. I’d prefer not to be talking to you in this way. I don’t think I’m better than you, but I’m certainly no worse than you, so save the speeches. You don’t want my money? That’s fine.” The music came to a close, and the few customers clapped desultorily as the dancer gathered up her clothes and headed for the dressing room.

  “You’re up,” I said. I began to pull the fifty back, but her hand slapped down upon the edge.

  “He didn’t come in this morning. Last couple of mornings neither.”

  “So I gather. Where is he?”

  “He has a place in town.”

  “He hasn’t been back there in days. I need more than that.”

  The bartender announced Lorelei’s name, and she grimaced. She slipped from her chair, the fifty still trapped between us.

  “He got hisself a place up by the Congaree. There’s some private land in the reserve. That’s where he’s at.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “You want me to draw you a map? I can’t tell you, but there ain’t but one stretch of private left in the park.”

  I released the fifty.

  “Next time, I don’t care how much money you bring, I ain’t talking to you. I’d be better earning two dollars from those sorry motherfuckers than a thousand selling out good people to you. But you can take this for free: you ain’t the only one bein’ askin’ about Tereus. Couple of guys came in yesterday, but Willie gave them the bum’s rush, called them fucking Nazis.”

  I nodded my thanks.

  “And I still liked them better than you,” she added.

  With that she walked to the stage, the CD player behind the bar knocking out the first bars of “Love Child.” She had palmed the fifty.