Ultimate Sacrifice

by S. E. Green

  Bee-Bee, though, she never really had anything nice to say about Mark. A few years ago she told me he was in to some weird crap and that was a huge part of why they divorced. Back when she told me that I thought maybe she meant porn or something.

  But now I wonder.

  As we step through the woods into PaPaw’s back yard, I glance up to his brick house and see a few shadows move inside, indicating everyone is definitely still here. A couple of his goats migrate toward us as we circle the corral, and idly, I run my hand across one of their heads. PaPaw never names his goats, but I do. This one is Joseph, because of his many colors. The one that died? That one was Mo, because of a tuft of hair on top of his head that always reminded me of a Mohawk.

  The sun completely sets, and we use Travis and Bee-Bee’s flashlights to guide us the rest of the way across the yard and up the front steps. When we walk in PaPaw’s home, he and Dad are sitting in the living room talking, and Mom and Uncle Jerry are standing in the kitchen. Simultaneously, they all look up at us in surprise.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Mom moves from the kitchen straight toward Bee-Bee and wraps her in a hug. I hear her mumble something, and Bee-Bee nods, and Mom leads her over to sit on the couch.

  Dad comes toward us. “What are you kids doing? Where’s Kevin?”

  “Kevin’s at home.” I nod over to Bee-Bee and lower my voice. “She thinks Mark knows something. She said she told Detective Crandall, but she’s not getting any response.”

  Dad looks into the living room where Mom has her arm around Bee-Bee. We watch as Uncle Jerry sits down on the other side of her and she moves from my mom’s arms over to his.

  With a sigh, Dad glances at his watch. “Almost eight. Have you guys eaten?”

  We shake our heads.

  He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out some cash. “None of us have. Go to that Chinese place and get us all some food. Let us talk to Bee-Bee. Just take your PaPaw’s Jeep. Keys should be in it.”

  “Are we getting a lawyer?” Travis asks.

  “No, we’re not.” Dad opens the door. “Now go and let us talk to Bee-Bee.”

  Dad closes the door, and me and my brother head across the yard to the Jeep. “I know they think having a lawyer will make us look guilty or something,” Travis says, “but I really think we need one.”

  “Me, too,” I agree.

  He opens the Jeep and climbs in, and we fall silent after that as Travis drives us the fifteen minutes or so into the city limit. Aside from our last disastrous day of school, this is the first time we’ve been into town since all of this went down. It’s almost like we’ve been on house arrest.

  Warm air flows in our open windows, and I inhale deeply the moistness of it, the summer of it. We pass our high school and a twinge of sadness settles through me. This was supposed to be the best week of our lives. The last week of senior year when you see all your friends and sign yearbooks, skip classes and hang out with your favorite teachers—one last hooray and all that. The place sits empty now, everyone gone home for the day.

  My thoughts drift to Uncle Jerry and my parents—they all went to high school here, too. So did Bee-Bee and Mark. I’ve never thought about it before, but they all grew up together. I look over at my brother. “What do you know about Mark?”

  “Nothing much. Tall guy, long beard. Does this weird thing where he constantly taps his forehead. I think Dad ended up firing him on the last job he helped with.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.” Travis bumps over the railroad tracks, and hangs a left into the bad part of town.

  I sit up in the seat. “Wait a minute. Where are you going?”

  “The trailer parks. I’m curious if reporters are hanging around Mark Doughtery’s trailer, and I want to know if the police ransacked his place like they did ours. But mostly I just want to see if he’s there. Because if he took off, I’d say that’s a pretty huge red flag that he might be involved in this.”

  I want to tell my brother to turn around, but I don’t. Because the truth is, I’m curious, too. We’ve been holed up on our property for days, and other than the Internet and TV, I have no clue what’s really happening beyond County Line Road.

  We pass a deserted warehouse and an old brick grocery store with bars on its windows. I know our bad part of town is nothing compared to a big city, but it’s still bad. What crime we do have always seems to stem from this area.

  My eyes trail over a couple of cats laying on top of a dumpster. “How do you know where he lives?”

  “I heard Dad and Uncle Jerry mention it one time.”

  We drive past several trailer parks before Travis turns right into the one on the end. Several flickering street lamps spot the park, casting the area in an odd yellow, strobing glow, and I think back a few years. “Do you remember coming here with our youth group to hand out Christmas gifts?”

  Travis nods. “Yeah.”

  “There were all these barefoot kids running around, this huge woman smoking a cigar, an old man pacing in a circle mumbling to himself, and this girl who couldn’t have been much older than me pregnant and drinking a beer.” I look over at my brother. “It made me realize how good we have it.”

  He smiles a little at that. Then flicking his headlights to dim, he begins to circle through the park. I take in all the run down, dilapidated trailers, and it’s like those years haven’t even passed.

  Travis pulls all the way to the end where a trailer sits completely dark. He puts the Jeep in park, letting his dimmers illuminate the small manufactured home and the mailbox out front with DOUGHTERY printed in faded black ink. I glance over to the side yard where a small swing set sits empty in the night. The sight of it twitches sorrow through me. Michelle will never play on that again.

  I drag my eyes off of it and look around—side to side and behind us. “No reporters. Do you think he skipped town?”

  Travis props his arms on the steering wheel. “Maybe.”

  “You think the cops raided it?”

  Travis sighs. “I hope so. Because then maybe they found something that will get them off of us and onto him.”

  “I suggest,” comes a deep and measured voice, “that you leave and do not come back.”

  A barrel of a shotgun slides right through Travis’s open window, and with a gasp, I lift my hands into the air and Travis immediately does the same. The barrel shifts and as Mark slides into view, my muscles constrict in fear.

  He looks the same as I remember. Short hair on top, bushy beard, tall, skinny, but his eyes . . . so swollen and red, like he hasn’t slept in days.

  Those puffy eyes look between us. “You don’t think I know about the New Satanic Empire, about the Ultimate Sacrifice. You don’t think I can prove it? I will. If it’s the last thing I do. I will, or I’ll die trying.”

  I cast Travis a quick look. “We don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, but the words New Satanic Empire echo around in my head. Mark knows what that is.

  His nostrils flare. “You better run, and you better run far, because next Sunday, one of you is next.”

  Carefully, Travis reaches for the gear shift, but I have a sudden urge to stop him. What does Mark mean, one of us is next?

  “She was only four years old,” Mark says and his voice breaks.

  My heart breaks right along with it. “Mr. Dough—”

  He clears his throat and his eye twitches. “Get the hell out of here.”

  Travis immediately moves, grinding the gear shift into reverse and carefully backing away. My gaze stays frozen on Michelle’s dad the whole way, standing with his gun pointed at our Jeep. Eventually, Travis puts it into first and pulls right on out of the park.

  I glance over to see my brother death clenching the steering wheel. “You okay?”

  “We shouldn’t have gone there.”

  “Travis, that New Satanic Empire that he mentioned, that’s the same thing I found when I was researching on the I
nternet. And what do you think he means by one of us is next?”

  “I don’t know.” Travis shakes his head. “Just let me think.”

  Neither of us talk as we drive past the other trailer parks, the deserted warehouse, and the old grocery, and as we near the railroad tracks back to our side of town, a car ahead of us catches my attention. It’s dark and there’s at least a half mile between us, but I know that car. “Travis, that’s Honey.”

  He squints through the night, and I know he forgot to put his contacts in. “You sure?”

  “Yes. There’s only one tail light. It’s her. Speed up.”

  He does at the exact second a train’s horn goes off somewhere to the right. Up ahead at the crossing, yellow and red lights begin to blink, and the striped barricade starts to lower across our side of the street.

  Honey doesn’t slow down and instead swerves around the barricade, crosses the tracks, and zooms away. Travis brakes to a stunned stop at the barricade and seconds later the train barrels by.

  He turns and looks at me. “What the hell?” He grabs his phone and dials Honey and it goes to voicemail. “Want to tell me why you just ran from me over the railroad tracks, and why exactly you were in the bad part of town?” He mashes END and angrily tosses his phone up onto the Jeep’s dash.

  This is not Travis and Honey. They don’t do this. They don’t fight. They don’t not trust each other. “Maybe someone borrowed her car,” I weakly suggest, though we both know that’s not likely. She’s so protective of her car she barely even lets Travis drive it.

  His phone rings, and he snatches it up. “What?” he snaps without even seeing who it is.

  A count of silence goes by and then I hear a guy’s voice, mumbling and distant.

  Travis sighs. “Where are you?”

  More mumbling.

  “How did you get there?”

  “Who is it?” I whisper.

  Travis shakes his head at me. “Just stay put,” he says into the phone. “We’ll be right there.” He hangs up and tosses his cell back down. “We don’t need this shit right now.”

  “What?”

  Travis sighs. “Kevin. He snuck out of the house and went to a field party, and he’s been in a fight.”

  AROUND THESE PARTS field parties are as good as they get. Somebody puts the word out, a big bonfire is built, and teens show up with beer and blaring music. There are a lot of farms in our county and field parties bounce from place to place depending on whose parents are out of town. We’ve never had one on our property. Between PaPaw and our parents and Uncle Jerry, an adult is always home.

  When we arrive at the field party some twenty minutes later to pick up Kevin, Wade flags us down. The party is in full swing, bonfire blazing, music thumping, some dancing, others hanging out talking and drinking, and yet others making out against their vehicles. If it weren’t for everything going on right now, this is exactly where me and Travis and Honey would be tonight.

  Travis cuts the engine and jumps out. “Where is he? What happened? How exactly did he get here?”

  Wade nods beyond a circle of cars to where a line of trees lead into the woods. In the glow of the bonfire I see Kevin sitting against a tree, his head hanging low, holding a rag to his nose. He looks so lost, so dejected, it breaks my heart.

  “I don’t know how he got here,” Wade tells us. “Caught a ride with someone, obviously. There were some guys messing with him about being a Devil worshiper, and Kevin just snapped. Me and my buddies broke it up and he’s been sitting over there ever since.”

  Travis shoots a glare around the party. “Who was teasing him?”

  “Doesn’t matter. They’re gone now.” Wade nods over to Kevin. “Just go talk to him.”

  Automatically, I move in that direction and Travis grabs my arm. “Let me,” he says and heads off without giving me a chance to respond.

  I watch him stride across the field, ignoring the people who turn to look, as Travis heads straight to our brother. He sits down beside Kevin and the two of them begin to talk. I don’t know what’s going on with Kevin, but he’s just so different lately, even before all of this stuff with Michelle went down. The gas sniffing for one, but a month ago I caught him poking at a turtle with a stick, and I’m not talking the hard shell, I’m talking underneath where the top and bottom meet, like he was trying to separate the two pieces.

  What are you doing? I snapped at him.

  It’s dead, he replied.

  I yanked the box turtle from his hands and looked at its little face. No, it’s not, Kevin.

  He shrugged. Oh, sorry.

  Then he walked away and I stayed where I was at the pond’s edge, staring at his back, convincing myself he really did think it was dead and was following some natural curiosity, but deep down I wasn’t sure. I just wasn’t sure. Yeah, something is just off with Kevin.

  Wade shifts a little, and I switch my eyes off of my brothers and over to Wade to see him staring at me. No, not staring, more like drinking me in.

  My face flushes, my pulse edges up a degree, and I automatically reach up to smooth my fingers through my hair.

  I want to make an excuse for how I must look—I mean, my God this has been one heck of a long day—but something in his dark brown eyes stops me. I could fall so in love with those eyes if given half a second in time. And the way they are tracking over my average features makes me feel like the most beautiful, freckled, brown-haired, hazel-eyed, non-average girl in the world.

  Is it possible he has a crush on me, too?

  He gifts me that half smile, and I melt. “It’s going to be okay,” he quietly tells me. “It’s not now, but it will be.”

  “Thanks,” I breathe. “I really needed to hear that.”

  He nods. “Sure.”

  From inside PaPaw’s Jeep Travis’s phone rings and I snatch it up. It’s Honey. I doubt Travis is going to like it, but I answer anyway, “Hey, it’s Vickie.”

  “Vickie, I don’t know what he’s talking about,” she rushes to say. “I wasn’t in the bad part of town.”

  “Well someone with your exact car was. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you’re the only person around here who drives a 2001 black Mustang with a missing taillight.”

  She doesn’t immediately respond, then, “Yeah, I’m the only one.” She sighs. “Damn, Edwin.”

  “Your brother? I didn’t know he was in town.”

  “Yeah, he’s been here about a week now.”

  I’ve met Edwin a few times. He’s one of those gorgeous guys who knows he’s gorgeous, with a smug and cocky personality to match it all. Other than their similar looks, he’s nothing like Honey. “I’ll let Travis know you called,” I assure her.

  IN THE DISTANCE the bonfire from the field party glows softly, and the muted notes of disjointed music flows through the Jeep’s windows on the evening air. As we drive away, I glance in the side mirror to Kevin’s reflection in back where he sits sullen with a swollen lip, blood crusted on his nose, and a bruised eye. He’s going to be in a lot of trouble with Mom and Dad.

  Travis’s phone rings and he checks the display but he doesn’t answer it. I saw the display. It’s Honey. I already told Travis what she told me, but he ignored it, and now he’s ignoring her.

  “Aren’t you going to get that?” I venture.

  “If I was going to get it,” he speaks slowly, like I’m dimwitted, “I would’ve gotten it. Obviously, I’m not.”

  I lift my hands. “God, okay. Never mind. I’ll shut up.”

  He doesn’t respond. I don’t respond. Kevin doesn’t respond. The tension already filling the air thickens, and all I want is to get out and get away from the two of them. Travis sighs then, and that’s the last sound any of us make until we pull past the reporters lining our property.

  “It’s eleven at night,” Kevin complains. “Don’t they ever go away?”

  Travis turns onto our gravel driveway and through our gate that is open for some reason. He follows the driveway
up to our house where we come to a stop right beside a dark car. He cuts his engine. “That’s Detective Crandall’s car. Talk about someone who never goes away.”

  A few seconds later we walk in the front door and the first thing I notice is our house, still a mess from the cops raiding it earlier. All three pairs of eyes silently turn on us—Dad, Mom, and Crandall. Their attention flicks over each of us before landing on Kevin’s face, but our parents don’t say anything about that or question where we’ve been, I’m sure because the detective is standing right here.

  “You three go to your rooms,” Dad automatically says.

  “No,” Mom interrupts. “Let them stay.”

  “Okay then,” Detective Crandall says. “Let’s proceed.” He opens a Home Depot shopping bag and pulls out a large square of folded beige cloth. “Do you know what this is?” he asks to the room.

  We all look at my dad. Of course we know what that is.

  “Yes,” Dad answers. “My brother and I own a home improvement business. We use things like that as drop cloths. I’m sure a lot of people use that as a drop cloth.”

  “Are you justifying the use of this?” Crandall asks.

  “No,” Dad sighs as he pinches the bridge of his nose. “Just tell us why you’re here.”

  “Did you recently do a job that involved silver paint?” Crandall asks.

  Dad thinks about that for a few seconds. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’d have to check my logs.”

  The detective opens his briefcase and pulls out my father’s log book that I assume was taken in the earlier raid. “You mean this one?” Crandall asks, already opening it to a tabbed page. “One year ago almost to the date. ‘Mason’s remodel’,” he reads.

  Dad’s brows lift. “And?”

  “Two things are curious to me about this entry. One: Mark Doughtery was on the payroll.”

  Dad nods. “He worked for us on and off, depending on the project. That job was the last he did for us.”

  Crandall’s brow lifts. “Why was that?”