The Soul Hunter

by Melanie Wells

  David has been talking about commitments lately. And truthfully, he’d be great at it. The man is a block of concrete when it comes to reliability. He’s got family man written all over him. I’m always the one running away from things. I can’t commit to finishing a sandwich.

  So when Enrique Martinez, with his slight tilt of an accent and his quiet way, sat at my kitchen table until two a.m. and listened and laughed and peeled the label off his Shiner, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I’m not sure what to name it. Settled might be the word. And I couldn’t possibly have been more surprised.

  I didn’t even bother to clean up the mess in the kitchen until after he left. That’s how comfortable an evening it was. I actually sat there for three hours with dirty chili bowls on the table and all my cleaning products sitting out on my kitchen floor.

  After he left and after I’d hosed down the kitchen, I walked around and picked up all the glue traps and threw them away. I pulled out my humane traps again, loading them up this time with the rest of the chili. Maybe all those days of anticipation would lure the little monsters in.

  Morning brought a modicum of renewed energy. Nothing untoward happened during the night, which was enough of a relief to revitalize me a bit. That and a decent night’s rest, with heat in the house and a pair of warm socks.

  My traps were empty when I woke up. The chili was gone, of course.

  I’d been ignoring phone messages for a while now, so I made myself sit down and make a slew of calls, cleaning up all the loose ends I’d left flapping the last few days. It was fortuitous timing, actually. Saturday mornings are a great time to return calls. Almost no one ever answers the phone.

  I left a message for my dad and Kellee—sure, I’d love to come to a baby shower…no, wait. I forgot I have a seminar to give that weekend (writing myself a note to schedule a seminar somewhere the first weekend in June, as far from Houston as possible). I returned a call from Guthrie, who was on the golf course when I talked to him, so he didn’t sound too bad. And one from Maria Chavez, who was back in her house and wondered if I’d like to get together sometime. I said sure and wondered if I was actually making a friend.

  I called David, who did not pick up, though I left lengthy, appropriately contrite messages at his house, on his cell phone, and on his office line at the funeral home. I figured he’d call me back when he was good and ready.

  I left messages for both Jackson and McKnight. We seemed to have gone into separate corners, working from different points of view and with different agendas.

  I knew where they were coming from and what they wanted. They were cops and they wanted Gordon Pryne convicted and off the streets. My point of view was cloudy and my agenda wasn’t even as clear as that. I was on one of my compulsive, maniacal searches for some speck of truth out there in the darkness somewhere. Flying around the yard in circles, headless, wings flapping.

  I once read about a rooster that survived six months without a head. Its owners fed it corn kernels through its gullet until it finally gave up the fight and died. I’m serious. That would be just my luck. Six months on life support and then die in the dirt anyway without ever knowing what hit me.

  I placed another call to Brigid, Drew’s birth mother, who apparently never answers her phone. And then summoned my courage to call Drew’s adoptive parents at the Jesus commune in East Texas. I’d found only one phone number for Life of Christ Community. I called it and reached someone named Esther who said she would give the Sturdivants the message to call me. No, they certainly did not have a phone, she said. I could tell she wasn’t even writing down my number.

  My last calls were to the three most amicable members of my review committee. I needed to start greasing the system to get John Mulvaney kicked off the panel. Otherwise, I was in for a fight, no matter how solid my work was. He’d jump me through hoops just for the sheer entertainment of it. He seemed to have an odd fetish for watching me squirm.

  I spent the rest of my Saturday hunched over books in Bridwell Library. I cracked every source I could find on angels and demons and heaven and hell, including the ponderous book of Enoch. The second heaven, Anael’s territory, is apparently where the demons are kept. The very ones that raped those women. After this particularly heinous act of rebellion, God exterminated the population by pouring forty days’ worth of water on the anthill. I guess He decided just to start over.

  I got the feeling, reading it all, that I’d stumbled onto some secret keyhole I wasn’t supposed to know about. Something straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. Something, as anyone who has watched Harrison Ford run from the boulder knows, is best left undisturbed. Poke your key into that lock and all hell can break loose.

  At the end of the day, though, I’d made peace with the fact that, no matter how much I knew, I’d probably never understand the whole of it. The hard truth is, as much as the theologians would love to have you believe otherwise, the Bible is unclear about the entire matter.

  One thing did stand out to me: all this mystical intrigue was just the thing to snare a girl like Drew Sturdivant. A girl wandering around lost without a soft place to land. I went back to the Hebrew that Eli had translated for me. “Daughter of Lot, lost and little.” The Hebrew word for daughter is bat, of course. As in bat mitzvah. No wonder Eli had laughed at me for forgetting it. I’d attended his daughter’s bat mitzvah two years ago.

  I turned to the account in Genesis. This is one of those stories I always forget about—and then when I read it again, I wish it were never in there in the first place. God can be so confounding sometimes.

  Angels show up at Lot’s house in Sodom to warn him they’re about to torch the town because of all the sickos living there. By all accounts, Sodom was every drunken festival you can imagine—Mardi Gras and New Year’s Eve and Carnival, every day, all day long. In Vegas. Without the Elvis suits. But the celebrants weren’t happy at all or even celebratory. Just sordid and foul-breathed and violent, not to mention sexually predatory.

  So all the men in town turn up at Lot’s door and demand he send out his houseguests to be raped by the masses. Nice. Lot, to his credit, refuses, but then, not to his credit, offers up his two virgin daughters instead. Real nice. The angels intervene, bar the door, and take the family out the back to safety. The town burns, Lot’s wife looks over her shoulder, and the rest is history.

  The part I’d forgotten about is that the daughters take a turn for the worse at this point. They look around, see no likely breeder stock, and then decide to get Dad soused and have a go with him instead. Real, real nice.

  My psychologist mind always wanders into people’s heads when I hear stories like this, not to find them an excuse, but to understand what could have gone so terribly wrong. Was Lot just a moron or had he perhaps been locked in a closet and tortured as a small child? And what about those daughters? How had they lost their way? With a father like that, growing up where rape is the town sport, was their outcome inevitable—some tragic version of predestination?

  If I put myself there, behind their eyes, they seemed like Drew to me. Hopeless. Alone. Little. Lost.

  Drew Sturdivant’s family had been willing to offer her up, not once but twice. Brigid had started the whole mess when she’d abandoned her eight-year-old daughter at the Jesus commune. And then Drew’s adoptive parents had turned around and offered her up again, marrying her off to a drippy, middle-aged insurance salesman type with a comb-over, when she was still a child herself (though admittedly a cranky one). Drew finished the job, turning even farther south after that, offering herself up on the altar at Caligula in a way that could only demean her.

  Daughter of Lot, lost and little. And angry So, so angry.

  I had a clear picture of her now, in her room, with the pink walls and the gray chiffon curtains, spray-painting her life story on her headboard. Standing there in some renegade outfit she’d made herself, her crimson hair sticking straight out, her combat boots laced, ready for a fight.

  B
ut a fight, I believe, she knew she was bound to lose.

  28

  Melissa is the only rabbit I know (as though I know any other rabbits) who will play fetch. Which she does, endlessly. Her mouth doesn’t open real wide, since of course she’s a rodent, but she’d found a spool of thread—one of those little ones they sell in airports—and brought that to me a couple of hundred times, chasing after it as I rolled it away. After she’d entertained us both with this game for almost an entire hour on Sunday morning, she sat on my feet and calmly munched an apple (dead, raw, organic) while I read the paper. She was turning out to be good company.

  I tucked her into her hutch, gathered my gear, and headed out to the SMU pool (indoor again). I swam a mile, and then did some lunges and squats to resurrect my Thigh Recovery Program. I’d forgotten about it in all the fuss. I wanted to be at my physical, mental, and spiritual peak by the time I arrived at the pokey that afternoon for my visit with Gordon Pryne.

  Every fourth Sunday at my church is devoted entirely to singing, so the spiritual peak part was no problem. The service that morning was a lung-buster. I was dripping with the Holy Spirit by the time I got out of there.

  I’m starting to get comfortable with jails, which worries me. So when I entered the Lew Sterrett Justice Center in downtown Dallas, I knew what to do. The procedure is all about suspicion. Guilty until proven innocent. Show your ID to prove you’re actually you. Allow your personal effects to be examined to prove you’re not smuggling anything in. Pass through a metal detector to prove you’re not packing. Give your name to the receptionist and show your ID again—as though you could somehow have transformed into someone else during that ten-foot walk down the linoleum. And finally, wait for your escort because you cannot possibly be trusted to wander around unobserved.

  The whole thing happens under the cold stare of armed guards who study you like you’re about to hijack the place. And who can blame them, with what the world’s come to? Suspicion is our one remaining buttress against the forces of evil among us. The human ones, anyway. That’s a sad fact.

  Enrique Martinez met me in the holding area and walked me into the bowels of Lew Sterrett. I couldn’t help but notice how deep-set his brown eyes were, and the ambling, easy way he walked as he led the way. He looked good from behind in those jeans he was wearing.

  The visitor room is just like all the other rooms in correctional facilities. Drab, damaged, and stinky, like an old banana. It’s one long, divided space, with bulletproof glass running down the middle to segregate the land of the free from home of the captured. Tables run along the window line, with little booth-walls dividing the spaces. Chairs are lined up in front of speakers that allow for communication across the divide. Martinez motioned me to a booth and pulled out a chair for me.

  Pryne came into the room on the other side of the glass, shackled at the hands and feet. He shuffled and limped, supported almost entirely by two guards who held him by the arms and slid him along between them on stocking feet.

  Crystal meth is like anti-Botox. It ages you like no amount of Dust-Bowl hardship can. The mug-shot photo I’d seen of Pryne had been taken less than six years before, after the Chavez rape. He’d looked his age then, maybe even a few years younger. The man who sat down in the chair opposite me looked seventy, at least. His face was scabbed and pocked, his eyes yellowed and hollow, and the dark circles under his eyes ran halfway down cheeks that had cracked and dried up like the floor of a dead riverbed. The wild brown hair was matted and filthy I could smell his stink through the speaker-hole.

  Without looking at me, he picked up the phone.

  I picked mine up and waited, wishing I’d brought along some hand-sanitizer gel.

  He mumbled through the line, his voice scratchy, like he hadn’t used it in a while. “Will you tell them to leave me alone?” His expression was sheepish, obsequious. It was hard to believe this was the same man who had lunged at the mirror and howled at me in the interrogation room.

  “Tell who? The police?”

  His hands shook violently, his face screwed up, and he began coughing and heaving, doubling himself over his knees for a minute.

  The coughing stopped and he asked it again. “Will you tell them to leave me alone?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re asking me, Mr. Pryne.”

  “They’re watching me,” he said. “All the time.” He yawned, showing me a mouthful of brown, rotting teeth. “They won’t let me sleep.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who is watching you?”

  “They got eyes on me. Inside my head.”

  If I hadn’t seen what I’d seen on that interrogation video, I’d have talked to him a second, patronized him just enough to assure him I’d deliver his message to the intruders in his head, and then walked down the hall and asked the sergeant on duty to take him to a Parkland shrink for evaluation. In another setting, he would have been just a run-of-the-mill psychotic drug addict who needed a script for 500 milligrams of Seroquel and seventy-two hours of observation.

  As it was, I said, “Do you know who they are?”

  “You know who they are,” he spat. “I don’t care to know. Don’t matter no more. Not to me.” He called me a name I won’t repeat.

  “Mr. Pryne,” I said firmly, reflexively whipping out a set of well-oiled clinical skills, “if you want me to help you, you’ll need to speak to me respectfully.”

  He ducked his head like a beaten animal and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “No offense.”

  “I don’t know who they are,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re a liar,” he said quietly.

  Martinez started to interject, but I held up a hand to stop him.

  “What makes you think I’m lying?” I asked.

  “I know all about you. Liar. Lyin’ scheming…” There was that word again. “Everyone knows how women lie. Trying to trap you and trick you and keep you down. Thinkin’ they’re better’n you.”

  “Mr. Pryne, I thought we agreed you would speak to me respectfully. One more outburst and I walk out of here and never come back. Understood?”

  He ducked his head again and shuddered.

  “What makes you think I know who they are?” I asked.

  “You was at the lake, wasn’t you?”

  “What lake?”

  “The lake. Where the spirits are.”

  I felt the room get cold. I looked over at Martinez, whose eyebrows had come together, his expression sharp, alert. His hand had moved to his holster.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Pryne,” I said.

  “You’re a liar,” he said again.

  He was right, of course. I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “What do they want with you, Mr. Pryne? Why won’t they leave you alone?”

  “You tell me. You’re the one knows ’em.”

  “I don’t know any spirits, Mr. Pryne.”

  He cursed at me and spat at the window, aiming a big wad of contempt right at my face.

  I pushed back my chair and stood up. “I told you I’d leave, Mr. Pryne. I meant it.”

  I picked up my bag and motioned for Martinez to follow me.

  Pryne started screaming. “Don’t you walk away from me, you…” I sighed, wishing he’d choose another word. “You think you’re better’n me?” he yelled. “That I ain’t worth saving? I never killed nobody! Ask the rats! They’ll tell you. Ask the rats!”

  He stood up and screamed obscenities at me until the guards on his side of the world caught him from behind, slamming his face down on the tabletop to subdue him. He was still screaming when we walked out of the room, the eyes of the other visitors and prisoners following us silently as we left.

  Neither of us said a word as we walked down the hall to the exit. It wasn’t until we were standing outside in the cold sunshine that Martinez said, “Coffee?”

  We walked around the block and found a coffeehouse. I ordered the largest possible serving of Earl Grey with cr
eam and sugar. Martinez had a small coffee, black. Though it was cold outside, we both headed for a sidewalk table. I wanted to breathe some air and feel the sun on my face.

  “You okay?” he asked after we sat down.

  I nodded and took a sip of my tea. Too hot.

  “You?”

  He nodded. “Any idea what that was about?”

  I shrugged. “What do you think?”

  He shrugged back. “Beats me.”

  I took the top off my tea to let it cool, releasing a wisp of steam into the crisp afternoon.

  I think we both knew that something was going on with Gordon Pryne. Something more than a psychotic break. I’d felt the evil in the room, that ominous and now alarmingly familiar feeling I get when Peter Terry comes around. I suspected Martinez had felt it too. He’s sensitive that way like I am. But I sure didn’t want to be the one to bring it up.

  Martinez saved me the trouble.

  “You feel the room get cold?”

  I nodded.

  “Like Jackson and McKnight said.”

  “And Yaya,” I said.

  “God rest her soul.” He crossed himself. “Same thing happened when I saw him yesterday.”

  “The room got cold?”

  He nodded. “Kept talking about someone watching him.”

  We waited for a bus to rumble past us.

  “He’s in terrible shape,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “It’s the meth,” I said. “Dries people up from the inside.”

  “Wicked drug. No doubt about that.” He took a drink of his coffee and looked up. Jet contrails had crisscrossed a big X in the bright blue sky over the city.

  “Who do you think’s watching him?” he asked finally. He leveled his eyes at me. “He seems to think you know.”

  I looked back at him. “I’m not sure.”

  “But you have a theory.”

  My turn to nod. “I do.”

  “Want to let me in on it?”