Side by Side wm-3

by John Ramsey Miller

The motorcycle started and roared off.

  The woman stomped back into the trailer and slammed the door.

  Elijah started crying.

  The woman stormed into the bedroom, the light pouring in blinding Lucy. She put her hand up in front of her face to protect her eyes from it.

  “I’m fixing to have to leave you two here by yourself for a few minutes. Don’t you even think about trying to get out, because I’ll know it if you do and I’ll take it out on your kid. You got that?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “You just remember that watching one of you is easier than watching both of you.”

  “I understand.”

  “You damn well better, missy. You better. Because as the Lord above is my witness, I will twist his little head right off and pitch it out into the woods for the coyotes to clean. And stop cryin’.”

  “I understand.”

  The woman plucked Elijah out of the playpen and brought him to Lucy.

  Elijah, realizing that the silent woman on the bed in the strange room was his mother, clung to her. Lucy watched as the big woman snatched a coat from the arm of the couch, and slammed the door going outside.

  Lucy heard the outside metal door creak open and slam shut again. A few seconds later she heard what sounded like another motorcycle roar to life and drive away. The other door must be to a shed. . or a gate in a fence.

  For a precious minute she held Eli to her, caressing his head, kissing his cheeks.

  “Momou. Momou. Momou,” he said over and over.

  “It’s okay, Elijah,” she told him. “I love you, baby. I love you so much. You are going to be safe.” Your father says so.

  She thought about the big woman’s threat, and she believed the woman would make good on her word by hurting them, but she couldn’t make herself believe the woman would actually kill them. If these people intended to do that, why hadn’t they already done so? Everybody knew that abductees had no value once they were dead. Lucy was increasingly sure this was about money. A ransom. But, she thought, the woman is obviously unstable. People in these circumstances do die, and for your sake, Walter, I can’t risk that happening to Elijah.

  FREE. A four-letter word for getting the hell out of Dodge.

  26

  Peanut Smoot strolled into the brightly lit drugstore and made a beeline for the prescription counter in the rear. The store was one in a chain of fifteen regional stores owned by a pharmacist Peanut did business with. The owner had a problem that involved deviant sexual needs that respectable people didn’t advertise, and Peanut had fixed it up so the man could safely get the urge met. As a result, the owner had been recruited to buy any pharmaceutical drugs Peanut’s people came across as well as the other kinds of drugstore items you might find-like shampoo, tampons, and batteries-in a truck you’d hijacked.

  When the owner spotted Peanut through the observation window in his office, he hurried out into the area where three lab-coated pharmacists were filling small bottles from large ones. The man seemed a little nervous, but that was probably because they usually met late at night after the employees had left.

  “Mr. Smoot,” he said.

  “I need something for back pain, George.”

  “What type of pain?” The skin on George’s face seemed stretched tighter than usual, his eyes darting around the store behind Peanut like he was suspicious that something odd was going on out there in the aisles.

  “The back pain kind.”

  “By that I mean how did you injure your back?”

  “I fell off a ladder.”

  “I have just the thing,” George said, holding a finger in the air. He darted off into a back storage room. When he returned, he handed Peanut a box of over-the-counter pain medication and, after winking at Peanut, said loudly enough to be heard, “These will work as well as anything nonprescription.”

  Peanut handed the druggist a ten-dollar bill and waited for him to go through the cash register motions and make change for it.

  “Please come again,” George said with a forced cheerfulness, like he was talking to just anybody who had come in to spend money in a store he earned by marrying the owner’s daughter, who herself looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy with hair that looked like a hat made out of straw painted red.

  George had made up the incapacitation liquid Peanut needed to make the Dockery woman stay put. It was a potent blend of chemicals that doctors used for operating and had the effect of making it impossible for someone to move until it wore off.

  Back in the truck, Peanut opened the small pasteboard box and took out a bottle that contained, not the blue caplets the box promised, but a couple dozen capsules filled with tiny colored balls.

  Peanut swallowed two of the caps and chased them with a carbonated sip of warm soda out of a can he’d had sitting in the holder a good while.

  When his unregistered cell rang, he saw that it was a familiar pay phone number. Peanut knew that cellular calls were not private. Ask Pablo Escobar about using a cellular when the government wants to track you by your voice.

  “What?”

  “There’s a little problem.” It was his son Buck’s voice.

  “What?” Peanut felt the hollow burning in his stomach he always got when Buck said he had a problem. Buck’s little problems tended to be larger than he’d admit to.

  “Damn twins.”

  Peanut took a deep breath and shifted in his seat. “What’d they do?”

  “I gave them that little digging job to do, but when I came back they’d gone off. Hadn’t more than just started it.”

  “Go find ’em and you get it done.”

  “I don’t know where to look.”

  “Hellfire, boy, they didn’t go to Mars in a flying saucer. Just go to where you saw them last and track ’em down. Y’all mess this deal up, I’m gone mess you up. You got that?”

  “I hear ya. Everything’s fine, except for the twins getting lost. Everything else is a hunnerd percent right like it’s supposed to be.”

  “It damn well better be.” Peanut checked his watch. “You don’t find them in a hour, you call me back and I’ll come out and see to it. And you make damn sure the you-know-what stays put. Don’t do nothin’ stupid.”

  Peanut closed the phone. It was obvious that Buck had ordered the twins to do what he was too lazy to do, then left them alone with just his instructions to go by. Peanut had told Buck to dig graves so he’d stay occupied. He didn’t know for sure where the Dockerys would be buried, because nobody had told him that yet. Maybe they’d want the bodies found sometimes, or put under a slab, or ground into burger. He should have told Buck not to involve the twins-or leave them alone to do the digging. Some things you could tell the twins to do, some things you couldn’t leave them at. Buck knew that better than anybody. Trouble was, Buck was like some kind of animal that couldn’t think about food until he was nearly starving to death. You couldn’t trust him to plan ahead or stick to any particular job for very long.

  The psychologist that Peanut had taken Buck to because the public school made him do it had said he had behavioral issues. Peanut loved the term issues.

  Peanut knew all there was to know about his oldest son.

  Buck didn’t give a damn about anybody but himself.

  He didn’t like people telling him what to do.

  He had a hair-trigger temper.

  He got a kick out of other people’s pain.

  He was a liar.

  He imagined things.

  He was a bully.

  Nothing made him sick to his stomach.

  He never felt guilty about anything he did.

  He took what he wanted when he wanted it.

  He always got his revenge.

  All of the “issues” that made Buck a hellcat to teach or to get to follow orders worked in the boy’s favor when it came to enjoying a successful career in his chosen field-the family business.

  27

  Dixie Smoot opened her mouth and snapped it closed to cl
ick her porcelain teeth loudly-something she did out of habit when she was really pissed off.

  Buck said he’d left the twins to take a turn digging, and that he had just been gone for a “few” minutes to go and check on something. She couldn’t imagine what he had to check on out in the plumb middle of nowhere. Now Buck was gone off to the Utzes’ store down the road to use the pay phone to call Peanut about the twins. Her daddy would be fit to be tied if things weren’t going smoothly. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time he had needed to punch out Buck. When it came to discipline, her daddy didn’t spare a rod.

  Dixie figured she’d find the twins before Buck got back and joined her, because whenever he could get by with it, he’d get back too late to do any work. Buck was worse things than lazy, but what he did to others was between him and whoever he did it to. It was mostly the lazy part of Buck that complicated Dixie’s life.

  Dixie’s four-wheeler was one of several that Peanut’s people had found inadequately attended and had brought out to the house for hunting and chores. You could do a lot more with the 400cc Honda four-wheel-drive ATVs than use them for getting yourself and your gun into the woods, and bringing deer back out when you killed one. The roads on the thousand-acre property were really just trails and a challenge for the most rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles.

  There was only one real road onto the land, and it was hardly more than a dirt path with some gravel scattered on it so you could get vehicles to the barn. You could get around the land on a tractor, and they had one in the shed, but the ATVs were a lot faster. The tractor had a winch on it, and if you wanted to get around on the land to work with it you spent more time pulling it up out of the steep and eroded creek banks than working.

  The rain was an annoyance, stinging her face. She wished she had remembered goggles so she could open her eyes fully.

  If Dixie didn’t miss the turnoff and have to double back, Buck’s clearing was about a mile and a half away.

  As she sped along, the ATV would go airborne when she hit a mogul or a rut, and rain in her eyes or not, she couldn’t help but smile. If the snotty little bitch stayed put, like Dixie warned her to, she’d be all right till Monday. Dixie doubted she’d try anything, because she was a soft little nothing. If women like that didn’t put it out, there’d be a bounty on them.

  Anyway, if she didn’t stay put, she had her a real nice surprise coming that wouldn’t be nobody’s fault but her own.

  By following Buck’s directions, Dixie found the spot where the twins had started digging the hole. She drove the ATV around the field and soon picked up the tracks of the twins’ four-wheelers. Soon she spotted their Hondas and stopped beside them.

  She found them seated in an inch of rainwater with their broad backs against opposing ends of the hole. Burt and Curt Smoot looked like a pair of fat baby birds in a shoebox. They stared angrily up at Dixie, who stood in the loose dirt at the grave’s edge with her hands on her hips, shaking her head.

  The ground was torn up where they had tried to claw their way out of the steep-sided grave. A section of aluminum ladder lay five feet away. The hole was deeper than it needed to be by two feet, but her father had said that the hole should be deep enough to prevent anything from digging up the Dockerys, and it certainly was that.

  Since Burt and Curt weighed about three hundred pounds each, and the grass was wet and covered with the dirt from digging, there was no way they could get out without the ladder, or by one holding his hands for the other to climb out and get the ladder for the other. She didn’t have to be told that neither had been willing to depend on the other to get the ladder for them.

  “You’re dumb as sacks of barn owl poop,” she said.

  “It was him,” Burt said, pointing at Curt.

  Curt said, “You started it.”

  “You pulled me in!”

  “You pushed me and I just grabbed hold of you and we both fell in. I said I didn’t do it on purpose, you dumb mule.”

  Dixie spat into the standing water between them. “I swear, if the good Lord swapped possums’ brains with yours, the friggin possums would get the short end of the stick.”

  “Please put the ladder down, Dixie?” Curt pleaded. “It’s cold in here.”

  “I ought to leave you in there,” she said. “Buck told me y’all was left to dig, but he came back and found you hadn’t dug anything. I saw back yonder where you started the hole. How’d you end up way the hell over here? If you hadn’t left the four-wheelers in plain sight, I never would have found you.”

  “It wasn’t a good place to dig where he said to,” Burt said. “Where he said to dig was rooty as hell, and we didn’t have a pickax.”

  “We’d a needed a damned backhoe,” Curt said.

  “Dirt’s better here,” Burt said.

  “Daddy’s gonna be pissed,” she said.

  “You gonna tell him?” Curt chimed in, fear coloring his voice.

  “It could have happened to anybody,” Burt said.

  “It happened to a pair of idiot fools.” Dixie got the ladder and jammed it down in the grave between them.

  “You don’t have to tell Daddy,” Curt said, standing.

  “I sure don’t.”

  “Thank you for not telling Daddy.” Curt climbed out and stood up, offering a meaty hand to his brother.

  “Don’t thank me,” Dixie said, walking to her Honda and climbing on. “Buck went to call him.”

  When the engine caught, she sped across the clover field like she was late for something.

  28

  Lucy Dockery had been certain for hours that she could sense rain in the air, but she had yet to hear it hitting the trailer’s roof. Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her.

  She wondered if this going off and leaving her was a ruse on the woman’s part to see if Lucy did try to escape. She doubted the woman would stay gone long, or leave her totally unguarded. If the woman believed that Lucy was a frightened and helpless dilettante who would do as she was told, it still didn’t explain why she would allow her to try to escape. Could she be that crazy or that dumb? Well, thought Lucy, this might be the only break I get. People do escape from their captors.

  With Elijah clinging to her, she hurried through the trailer, looking for anything she could use.

  The main room-open kitchen and den-was decorated with stuffed deer heads. A layer of red dust seemed to cover every flat surface.

  It was immediately apparent that anything with an edge she could use as a tool had been removed. The spoons, knives, and forks in the kitchen were all plastic. Cast-iron pots and pans were stacked under an island with a granite top with stools on the ends and along one side. Next to the gas range a potbelly stove sat on a bed of bricks. There was not even a steel poker or shovel for the stove.

  Patterns made by the soles of boots and shoes covered practically every square foot of the filthy floor. In the den area a single couch with a wool blanket draped over it was shoved against a wall. Aside from that there was a playpen, and a new TV set perched on a coffee table.

  A door opened into a room on the end of the trailer with two bunk beds and a stench reminiscent of high school locker rooms. Hunting clothes, pairs of mud-encrusted boots, grimy underwear and socks were in piles over the floor. There were no guns in evidence, and that was just as well since Lucy knew she could never use one. The idea of killing horrified her to the core. She had always been anti-capital punishment, antiwar; she didn’t even believe abortion was all right.

  Maybe this was the sort of hunting camp Walter and his friends had sometimes stayed in. Walter had been a hunter and she’d been bored to tears when he and his hunting friends talked about it.

  Lucy had never gone camping or even to the woods with her husband. Now she desperately wished she had become involved in that part of his life.

  Lucy picked up a huge camouflage jacket with a hood and put it on to protect Eli and herself from the cool weather. She found an olive-colored compact flashlight that worked, w
hich was good because it was dark outside. She put her bare feet into a pair of absurdly large leather boots and quickly wrapped the long laces around and cinched them at the ankles so they wouldn’t fall off. Anything was better than going outside in her bare feet.

  Cautiously Lucy opened the outside door to the trailer and discovered that it wasn’t dark because it was night; it was dark because the trailer was parked inside an enormous building. It looked to be a warehouse with walls of fabricated steel. There were industrial fixtures connected to the beams, but all were unlit. Daylight illuminated narrow seams where some of the sheet metal panels joined.

  The roof was supported by the kind of steel girders you would see in one of those warehouse stores.

  Rain! Muted by layers of tar, rain beat down on the building’s flat roof. The floor was coated with the flour-fine red dust that had found its way inside the trailer. The trailer itself, standing on piles of cinder blocks, its flattened tires gone crocodilian with dry rot, had been backed into the building. There were two matching steel-frame doors, each at least sixteen feet tall and twelve wide. The steel hinges, three per door, were each a foot tall. The doors were diagonally across from each other on two connected walls. If the trailer wasn’t there, a large vehicle could drive in through one door, turn around the storage room that took up exactly one quarter of the space, and go out through the other one without stopping. The giant door facing the trailer’s door had a normal-sized door built into its corner so people could come and go without having to open the giant ones. This accounted for the sound she had taken for a shed door opening and closing.

  Using the light, she quickly looked around. The end of the trailer, where her cell was located, was maybe three feet from a warehouse wall. The other end, where the bunks were, was ten feet from the door that the trailer entered through.

  What she figured was a storage room had corrugated walls and a large rusted steel door with crudely made hinges. A run of wood steps led up to the storage room’s flat roof, where bales of hay, some ratty-looking furniture, and wooden crates were stacked. On the ground level, rolls of rusted barbed wire hung like Christmas wreaths on the walls.