Lord of the Mountain

by William Ollie

  “The hell were they fighting about?”

  “The goddamn Green Bay Packers.”

  “Jesus,” Earl said, then, rubbing a hand across the stubbled growth of his face, “Man, I feel like I haven’t slept in a week.”

  Alvie Ross groaned. “I was out like a baby when I got the call about Missy.”

  Earl, downshifting as they crested the mountain and headed down into Weaver’s Creek, said, “You ever killed anybody, Alvie Ross?”

  “Huh uh,” Alvie Ross said. “I’ve wanted to a couple of times, though.”

  “Me either, until tonight. Jesus, I set a teenage boy on fire, then blew his guts out. Splattered them against the wall of that shack. I watched a man burn to death.” Earl, who hadn’t given Alvie Ross any details of what had happened at the shanty, only that he had killed the bank robbers, now didn’t seem able to stop himself from talking about it. “Alvie Ross, I got shot tonight.”

  “What?”

  “That bullet hit dead center at my heart, hit my badge and stopped there.”

  “Goddamn, Earl. How is that even possible?”

  “It’s not,” said Earl, who had seen the .38 caliber revolver lying in the dirt, and knew there was no way he should have gotten off with just a bruise.

  “Somebody was looking out for you tonight.”

  Earl sighed. “I guess.”

  “You guess? .38 caliber bullet stopped by a piece of tin? By all rights, you should be dead.”

  “The bullet knocked me on my ass. I looked up and saw some stupid-lookin’ fucker pointing a .38 at me. All he had to do was pull the trigger. If he hadn’t looked away, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Alvie Ross sat quietly, as if he didn’t know what else to say, staring out the window as the police car made its way down into Weaver’s Creek.

  Earl passed the gas station where he had spotted the truck earlier in the day, took a right and crossed over an old wooden bridge, and then continued down into Miller’s Branch.

  A few minutes later, Alvie Ross nodded to the right. “Elmer’s place is just around the next bend. There you go, up there,” he said, pointing to an old dirt driveway angling off the road. “Slow down, that’s his truck in front of the house.”

  Earl pulled alongside Elmer’s truck, killed the engine and got out of the car, and then followed Alvie Ross onto the front porch, wondering what might be waiting inside the dark house they were about to advance on.

  Alvie Ross was about to knock on the door, when Earl whispered, “Wait.” After everything he had seen in the last twelve hours, he wasn’t taking anything for granted. Not on a porch out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. He pulled his pistol, nodded for him to go ahead, and Alvie Ross knocked on the door. “Elmer!” he shouted. “Elmer Hicks! Open up, it’s the police!”

  Then he stopped for a moment, listening for movement in the house while Earl stood behind him, his gun leveled at the door.

  Alvie Ross pounded on the door, shouting for Elmer to open it, pounded again and a sharp, metallic click came from the side of the house, Earl freezing, as behind him somebody called out, “Don’t move a goddamn muscle.”

  “Goddamn it, Elmer.”

  “Alvie Ross? The hell’re you doing?”

  Elmer Hicks stood before them, wearing nothing but a pair of white underpants.

  “The hell’re you doing with that gun?”

  “Gettin’ the drop on a couple of spooks sneaking around my house in the middle of the night.”

  Earl holstered his weapon, turned and took a deep breath, and saw Elmer Hicks leveling his shotgun directly at him. “We need to talk to you, Elmer, that’s all.”

  “Well, spit it out.”

  “Lower that weapon,” Alvie Ross ordered.

  “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.” Elmer pointed his gun toward the ground, easing the hammer back into place. “Let’s go inside,” he said, and then leaned his shotgun against the porch and disappeared around the side of the house. A few minutes later a light came on inside. Then the front door opened, and the two policemen stepped into Elmer’s living room, where they found Elmer, now wearing a t-shirt and a pair of jeans.

  “You always answer the door with a loaded shotgun?” Earl said.

  “I heard y’all bangin’ on my door, then I saw you standin’ there with a pistol. The hell was I supposed to think?”

  “I yelled police, didn’t you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I heard you, but…”

  “But what?” Earl said.

  “Thought you might be some of old man Jared’s boys.”

  “Oh yeah?” Earl said. “Why would you think that?”

  Elmer, smiling sheepishly, said, “Never mind.” Then, looking over at Alvie Ross, “Why don’t you just tell me what you’re doing way the hell out here at four o’clock in the morning.”

  “We’re here to talk about Missy Thomas.”

  “Where were you tonight, Elmer?” Earl asked him.

  “Right here. Why? What happened?”

  “All night?”

  “All day and all night. What happened? Tell me, goddamn you!”

  “Missy Thomas was found on Seeker’s Mountain tonight,” Earl said. “Somebody beat her to a pulp and strangled her to death.”

  Elmer’s face went slack as the color drained from it. “Nooo!” he cried out, falling to his knees and burying his face into the armrest of the couch, screaming into it, saying her name over and over, while Alvie Ross walked over and put a hand on the sobbing man’s shoulder, looked up at Earl, and said, “Satisfied?”

  Earl nodded. Elmer hadn’t killed her. He loved her—that much was obvious. He had been shocked and anguished by the news, not like that fat cocksucker back in town, who hadn’t batted an eye when he heard about his wife.

  Because he already knew. Because he did it.

  “Elmer,” Alvie Ross said. “Try and pull yourself together. Get on up here so we can ask you some questions.”

  Elmer stood up and took a seat on the couch, sniffling, using his t-shirt to wipe his eyes as he looked up at Alvie Ross. “What do you want to know?”

  “Jason said you’ve been after Missy ever since you got back. Said Missy told you to leave her alone.”

  “Said that, did he? Missy and I have been lovers for over a year now, since I got back from Detroit. She was here with me this morning. Stayed ‘til about three o’clock. Ask her sister, Myra. She brought her here.” Elmer put a hand across his forehead, massaging his temples as he looked down at the floor. “He treated her like dirt, like a slave. I told her to leave him. I could take her and the boys back to Detroit and get a factory job. Jason told her he’d kill her and the boys if she ever tried to leave him.”

  “She told you that?” Alvie Ross asked.

  “This morning while we were making love.”

  “Will you stand up and say that in court?” Earl asked him.

  “Yeah, right.” Elmer said.

  “What?”

  “It don’t make a good goddamn what I stand up and say. Ain’t no court in Baxter County ever gonna send a rich old prick like Jason off to Moundsville.” Elmer stood up, fists clenched by his side. “But I’ll tell you what: that son of a bitch is gonna get what’s comin’ if I have to give it to him myself.”

  “Hey,” Earl said. “You do anything to him and I’ll throw your ass in jail. Just let us handle this.”

  Alvie Ross smiled as if he had no problem whatsoever with Elmer’s threat.

  “Well, you’d better handle it quick, mister. Or I’ll handle it for you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The sun was rising when they left Jason’s house, spreading a blood-red dawn over the mountaintop. Faint rays of light filtered into the valley, where rooster’s crowed, cows mooed and milled around the pastures, and the citizens of Baxter County stirred from their sleep—some having already begun their day as two bone-weary policemen pulled to a stop in the middle of town.

  It had been a tough night. There hadn�
�t been much evidence at the house; just enough to convince Earl once and for all that Jason Thomas was a lying son of a bitch who had murdered his wife and children. Blood-specked shards of glass and drops of blood littered the living room floor, which, with the blood-spattered couch shoved sideways and the coffee table sitting askew in the middle of the room, was an absolute mess. In fact, the only thing that wasn’t out of place was the busted family photo, which someone had propped up on the mantle.

  The wealthy mine owner claimed he hadn’t been home, that he’d been playing poker all night, but there was his shirt wadded up on the floor, a handful of buttons scattered around it.

  Earl took a deep breath of crisp autumn air, crossed the railroad tracks and headed for the east end of Whitley. “It’s gonna feel good, slapping the cuffs on that prick.”

  “You got that right,” said Alvie Ross, who, exhausted and almost drifting off to sleep back at the stop sign, closed his eyes and rubbed his hands over them.

  “Why do you think he left her body on the mountain, Alvie Ross? Why would he dump her on the side of the road like that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does if Elmer’s right. Maybe she did leave him. You saw the blood in the living room, the lump on the side of his head. Maybe she clobbered his ass and when he came to she was gone. I’ll betcha anything he caught her on the mountain and went crazy on her.”

  “And just left Missy there like a piece of garbage, knowing we’d come straight to him when we found her.”

  “You saw him. He ain’t afraid of the law. He thinks he can buy his way outa anything. And maybe he’s right. Locking him up is just the start. We’ve got a long, tough row to hoe before that bastard sees the inside of a prison cell. Like Elmer said: ain’t no court in Baxter County gonna send that man off to Moundsville. Not as long as the less than honorable Theodore Croft has anything to say about it.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll just see about that,” Earl said, as he turned onto Sycamore Street, past Judge Croft’s, and then pulled up to the curb in front of Jared’s house, where he found the driveway empty, Jason’s Pontiac gone.

  “I’ll be damned,” Alvie Ross said.

  “The hell’d he go?” Earl said, and wondered if he would ever see his bed again.

  “Who knows?” Alvie Ross said, then, “Now what?”

  “If I had a pillow, I’d put it across this steering wheel and go to sleep.” Earl, yawning, blinked his eyes a couple of times. “Fuck it,” he said. “He ain’t going nowhere. Let’s go home and get some rest, track him down this afternoon.”

  “What if somebody needs a policeman?”

  “They can go to Teddy Levay and ask him why we’re not adequately staffed. Besides, we just had a bank robbery and a murder. What the hell else could happen?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Pitch stood by the car staring out at the horizon, his diamond stickpin sparkling in the sunlight. He really did love the view from his front yard, the lush carpet of green grass rolling down to the tree line, giving way to oak trees and bushes at the edge of his property; the noonday sky, clear and blue overhead, with its soft cotton-ball clouds drifting slowly across it. Mountain ranges off in the distance dotting the picture-perfect skyline like a glorious painting. It really is a purple mountain majesty, he thought, and then his thoughts turned to last night.

  Like his guests, Pitch hadn’t really known what to expect, what might happen once they had gathered at the sacrificial altar. As for them, the situation was new to him. The last time he had simply ripped open the lambs, taken what he needed and made Tomlin toss their empty little husks into the room at the back of the basement. He had no demonic statue back then, no grandiose ideas for gathering an evil flock of hillbilly devil worshippers unto him. Just a damp, dark basement, a secluded spot where he could carry out his business unencumbered.

  He had gotten the idea on a bayou in southwestern Louisiana, one dark night after being spirited away by a young Cajun woman, who, under a dazzling full moon, led him deep into a bug-infested swamp, where a stunningly beautiful woman was in the process of performing some strange ritualistic sacrifice of her own. He would never forget the dark-skinned disciples who had gathered in that clearing, dancing naked in revelry before a boar who had been trussed upside down from a wooden pole held off the ground by two sets of railroad ties crossed in an X a couple of yards apart, bound securely next to a burbling cast-iron pot suspended over a roaring fire. Nor would he forget the vile things floating about that unholy soup, or how the boar’s face changed from one of an animal to a blubbering human, its black pig eyes set into the face of a fat-jowled man, who begged and pleaded for the Voodoo Queen to release him as spells and incantations poured from her mouth, while the same dark blue eyes that had stared at Pitch on a dark mountain in the middle of West Virginia now gazed out at these revelers, who having given their up dancing, now lay fornicating throughout the clearing in front of her, the same blue eyes that had watched him float across that clearing. They were the same. He knew they were—he felt it. They were the same, and now here they were, telling him, ‘This is the way! This is how you do it! I brought you here! Worship me!’

  And as he stood in the clearing, watching something that just couldn’t be, a concept began to emerge, something that should have seemed quite ludicrous, but for some reason made more sense to him than anything had in his entire life, something that began to tug and pull, to fill his thoughts both day and night, until before he knew it, that was all he could think about. At night it would dance at the edge of his thoughts, a voice that would follow him everywhere he roamed—even in his dreams it would find him, a haunted whisper telling him, ‘This is the way, to power and riches and everlasting life, the way to ensure the clock never moves and your life never winds down’. He knew that voice, knew he had heard it in the middle of a clearing, in a cave in the middle of the night, a voice that soon began to lay out before him what must be done.

  Before the year was out, he had gathered a team of New York City architects second to none, and returned to his newly-built mansion. Together with a handful of pit-bosses, and an imported workforce numbering well over three hundred laborers, they carved out from Pitch’s already large basement, a huge cavern-like hall closely resembling Scratch’s own lair. It took a week to blast a gigantic tunnel down to the worksite, another day for a five-ton block of granite to be lowered into the newly-dug cavern. Under Pitch’s direction, a fine Italian sculptor fashioned a hugely proportioned, near-perfect likeness of the demon Pitch had found the night Aincil Martin chased him to his destiny.

  It took two and a half months for the massive crew to complete their work, but when it was done, Pitch had what he wanted: a huge cave, an unholy gathering place where his own tribe would assemble. And last night they had finally gathered together. Pitch didn’t know what would happen once he took the stage. Only that something would happen. As he danced across the stone platform, words spilling from his mouth, he had no idea what would come next, only where it was coming from: Scratch, Lord of the mountain, destroyer of innocence. Waves of power rolled over him as he spewed his wicked diatribe. Silvery words flowed from his tongue. Like a bible-thumping holy-roller calling the flock to Jesus, he called his wicked disciples to the Dark Master.

  When James Hastie turned tail and ran for the stairs, Pitch felt a dark hand clasp his shoulder. His cock stiffened beneath his pressed-black trousers when he stroked the child’s naked chest, and the power of the mountain thundered through his veins. The insurgent foreman was a mere plaything for him—cosmic, comic relief. He laughed gleefully when that cold, blue steel slipped into the frightened idiot’s mouth, and hot blood sprayed the cool night air.

  And when he raised that bloody little organ high above his head, his wailing sycophants falling to the floor and bowing at his feet, he was a King. He had the power.

  He was a god.

  He was God!

  A door opened and shut.

  Footsteps thudded across t
he porch and Pitch turned to see Hastie making his way down the stairs to the marble walkway.

  Pitch had spent the last twenty-six years traveling from town to town, alone. Lately he had come to think it would be nice to have a companion, a partner in crime, so to speak. He had once held high hopes for Jimmy Quick, the cold-blooded gangster who had led his best friend to a violent end in the basement of Louie Boccianni’s meat market. But when it came down to it, Hastie was weak, and last night he had proven himself to be worthless, barely fit for cleaning up after Pitch.

  Two hours ago, Pitch had found him stretched out in the library, tossing and turning on the couch, muttering in his sleep, apparently suffering his way through some sort of nightmare. Pitch smiled, remembering the shocked look of revulsion on Hastie’s face when he spied Pitch’s little friend on the altar, and the bloody bucket beneath it. Too bad he ran away like a frightened little girl before the show had even started.

  Too bad for him his usefulness had come to an end.

  “Ready to go, Jimmy?” Pitch asked, smiling warmly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  That’s right, Pitch thought. Sir, just like the butler you now are.

  He stood beside the rear passenger door, waiting for Hastie to open it, looked down at the door handle, and then back at Hastie, who stared dumbly back at him, pausing a moment before finally opening the door.

  Pitch climbed into the back seat, thinking, That’s right, houseboy.

  He felt vital, like a powerful charge of electric energy was coursing through his very being. He could hardly wait for tonight’s festivities to begin, to feel that tidal wave of unbridled energy crackling over him.

  But first things first.

  He had business to take care of.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Unbelievable,” Teddy Levay agreed, elbows on the armrest of his chair as he stared at the portrait hanging behind Croft’s desk: the honorable Judge Theodore Croft, his long black robe flowing, his brown eyes staring straight ahead.