All the Wicked Girls

by Chris Whitaker

  We are passengers trapped.

  If you trust, if you truly believe, then you’re immortal.

  I couldn’t take a wrong turn; I gave myself to the Lord and dared him to intervene. I packed my bag and wrote my note and said I was sorry but sorrow is wasteful. There ain’t no mistakes, there ain’t room for them.

  38

  The Nature of Addiction

  Black and Milk drove toward the King place. Black flashed the lights the whole way and blipped the siren twice when they ran up behind a tractor and the old man behind the wheel didn’t pull aside quick enough.

  “Another girl missin’,” Milk said.

  “It’s early, we only got the bones so far.”

  “They’re connected. He’s back, the Bird. Ain’t no doubt now.” Milk wiped the sweat from his head.

  Ernie had called; he was putting a team together but asked Black to head over ’cause he was nearer.

  Black cranked the A/C the second they crossed the town line and the sun hit.

  A thick crowd watched them pass as Black put his foot down, saw the needle climb and the horizon close.

  The Kings lived in Sundown, a dust and weed town a couple miles west of Grace. Black almost overshot the turn into Stockdale, had to wrench the wheel hard enough to leave him worrying they were headed into Still Creek.

  The King house was quiet. Black knew the press were heading out, though they didn’t know the roads like he did. There weren’t no signs in Sundown.

  “Hotter than Hades,” Milk said, squinting.

  Black took a moment. The house was small but the Kings’ land sprawled. He caught site of a combine maybe a quarter mile out, looked like it’d been left a while ago ’cause the birds were on it.

  The screen door opened before they got near. A kid ran out, barefoot and smiling, his momma not far behind.

  Jessie-Pearle King thanked them for coming and offered to make a pitcher of iced tea. It was so hot in the house Black almost took her up on it. There was a fan in the corner, he made the mistake of glancing at it ’cause the next thing he knew Jessie-Pearle was plugging it into the wall and aiming it at them. He knew folk rationed, kept the bills down, maybe an hour at nightfall to help the kids get off to sleep.

  “Amber’s a good girl,” Jessie-Pearle said straight off. “I know, believe me, I know what you must be thinkin’ but you should know she ain’t the sort to stay out. She’s got a boyfriend but he’s a neighbor’s kid and just about as worried as we are. She didn’t have a fight with her friends. I know what to do, I know where you’ll look. I called round the other parents. I spoke with Pastor Brazell.”

  “Amber goes to church?” Milk said.

  “Every Sunday, Brook Hill Baptist, with me and her brother. And I know what that means . . . with the Bird still out there.”

  “Is Amber’s father –”

  “Out lookin’. He’s drivin’ the streets.”

  “Any neighbors who might know somethin’, or want to help? We’re short of men at the moment,” Black said.

  “I know about the circus in Grace. I seen the news.”

  “Have you got a recent photograph we can –”

  She passed them a stack: Amber smiling, Amber playin’ softball, Amber eating a hot dog.

  They ran through the stocks: what time they last saw her, where she was headed, when she was due back. While Milk took details Black went up to her bedroom and saw much as he’d expected. Time was short, they’d move on the assumption she’d been taken and they’d set up blockades, all points. It was Ernie’s show but Black was deep.

  When Black headed down the stairs he heard Milk finishing up so he didn’t sit again, just stood looking out across yellow plains, the sun so fierce three wildfires had been called in in the last week alone.

  Milk smiled at the kid, who smiled back but pressed close to his momma.

  “Chief Black, I need you to do somethin’ for me.”

  Black met her eye.

  “I need you to skip the part where you look for an angle that ain’t there, where you look at us and our lives, and Amber and hers. I need you to trust me on this.” She wiped a tear as she spoke. “Someone has done somethin’ to her. She didn’t run. Every road you go down that don’t lead to a fresh kinda hell is wasted time. I know how that sounds, but I need you to get that.”

  Black glanced at Milk. Milk glanced back.

  When Ernie and his men got there they headed out.

  Jessie-Pearle stood among the crowd in the front yard, the sun hot on her shoulders as her world slipped from her grasp.

  *

  Black and Milk drove most of the way back in silence, both watching the sky. They saw the cloud from far off, hanging heavy above Grace like some cursed creature. Black eased off the gas as they drove down Hallow Road. The group had swelled with the news.

  Both flinched a little as the cruiser was swallowed by the dark wall.

  “It’s gettin’ harder to come back,” Black said, switching the lights on.

  “It is.”

  “It ain’t home. It ain’t . . . I don’t even know what it is. A month and the world has shifted.”

  Milk ran a hand over his .22.

  “Got all these fuckin’ vultures circlin’. Got the church on one side, Joe and his men on the other. We got a guy locked up for somethin’ he likely had nothin’ to do with, can’t be released ’cause he’d be strung up before he got the chance to open his mouth. We got Summer missin’, and the more time passes the more I reckon she ain’t comin’ back.”

  Milk rolled down the window. The square smelled of fire and trouble. An SUV with Maidenville plates was blocking the entrance to the lot.

  “Hell,” Black said, keeping his hand on the horn. He flashed the lights a couple times and ran the siren.

  Black gazed in the mirror and saw Joe Ryan staring back at him, more concern in his eyes than anything else. Black would go speak to him, tell him about Amber and hope that’d mean he’d lower the price on Samson’s head.

  He took his hand off the horn, pressed it twice more, and cursed.

  Milk opened the door, pulled his gun before Black could work out what was going on, and fired at the SUV. He put a bullet just above the wheel arch. There were a couple screams that came from the church side, a couple cheers from Joe’s men.

  Milk got back in as a guy emerged from Mae’s and ran over to the truck. His face was ash when he saw the hole. He raised his hands to the sky and near shit his pants when Black pressed the horn again.

  *

  Pastor Lumen was waiting on Black. Black would’ve cursed at Trix but she looked like she weren’t in no kinda mood for it.

  Pastor Lumen wore his finest suit and his collar.

  “What do you want?” Black said.

  Pastor Lumen took the hostility in his stride. “I want you to let my boy go.”

  “Ain’t happening. Anything else?”

  “I heard the rumblings, is it right? Is there another child missin’?”

  Black nodded and the old man shook his head sad.

  “Samson is innocent.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re bowin’ to criminals, Chief Black. How do you reckon that makes you look?”

  It was a question Black asked himself every morning when he got to the station. “It ain’t about how I look.”

  “It is. It’s about faith, and not in God, in you, Chief Black. This town ain’t what it was when I was a boy, even when you was a boy. They call it the Panic but it’s so much more. It’s the slow slide to a world without conscience. People are angry.”

  “People are always angry. There ain’t jobs, money. Country’s boomin’ and they ain’t felt none of it.”

  “I hold sway, still.”

  “With fear,” Black said. “When I was a kid I was scared of you.”

  “Much of it is show. But we need fear. You need it, fear of you, fear of the law. I need it and the church needs it, the fear of burnin’. Do you still lie awake at
night?”

  Black stared at him.

  “I know about the nature of your addictions, Chief Black. I know this will tip you, another girl gone. I know how you’ll reason with the pain and the guilt you feel.”

  Black closed his eyes to the old man.

  “You came to me when there was no one else,” Pastor Lumen said.

  “It didn’t help. Askin’ like that, forgiveness means nothin’ down here.”

  “So you go on, you roll over, you stand and fight. You mourn the death of your partner and you drink till you die. If that’s an offering . . . your only purpose now is to assuage your guilt.”

  “It’s not. I am tired of my place on this earth, that’s all.”

  “That’s all. You’re holdin’ my boy and –”

  “Why do you care? I see how you look at Samson. That day at the river, when Mary called us –”

  “I’d rather you didn’t speak my late wife’s name.”

  “I ain’t never seen a boy so scared of his father. What did you do to him? Clothes all wet like that.”

  “He was swimmin’ in the Red, we told him not to.”

  Black smiled. “Swimmin’ in all his clothes?”

  “Samson is a boy who needs guidance. The devil works hard to claim him.”

  “He ain’t a boy now. You don’t care about him, I see that clear.”

  “He carries my name.”

  “So it’s vanity. Ain’t that a sin?”

  Pastor Lumen smiled with something like pity in his eyes. “Let him go.”

  “You can’t protect him. Blood will be spilled.”

  Pastor Lumen stood. “Blood is always spilled in times of trouble. This cloud, I believe it’s time. I believe the reckoning is comin’. How will you measure up, Chief Black?”

  *

  Black spent the next hours liaising with Ernie, tipping the news vans, and making sure the whole county was watching for Amber King.

  It was gone midnight by the time he left the station. He stood on the top step, looking out over the square. The lights were still burning in Mae’s, business was brisk till the early hours and Mae took on a couple Beauregard girls to help out.

  There were rowdy folk outside the Whiskey Barrel, mostly outsiders, though Black caught a glimpse of Merle.

  The church people had laid down their placards for the night. Some lay back on the grass and stared straight up at the cloud, their mouths open as if they still couldn’t quite believe what was going down in Grace.

  Joe’s people were sleeping in lawn chairs, leaned right back with their guns on the ground beside them.

  Black walked down the steps and over to Joe, who was sat on the far bench, smoking a cigarette and looking out.

  Black settled beside him, pulled his gun out, and lay it between them.

  “Ava always wonders why you do that,” Joe said, exhaling heavy.

  “The gun?”

  “Yeah. She reckons maybe you’re tryin’ to show people you’re packin’ or maybe you’re tryin’ to show you don’t mean ’em no harm.”

  Black laughed.

  “But I said to her she’s readin’ too much into it. She does that. Lot of people do that. They’re always tryin’ to see shit that ain’t there, or work out why. Why this, why that.”

  “Maybe tell her it’s ’cause the damn thing digs into my hip.”

  “I would but she won’t believe it.”

  “You heard about the King girl?” Black said, taking a cigarette when Joe offered one.

  “I heard.”

  “State cops are comin’ down.”

  “That’s quick. No messin’ this time.”

  Black nodded and took the hit.

  “I know the Kings. I ran with Jimmy when I was fifteen. We tried to hold up the liquor store in Dawson, you remember it?” Joe said.

  “I remember.”

  “Stole his old man’s car and we parked it right out front, didn’t even hide the plates or nothin’. There was an old guy that owned that store, I don’t remember his name, but when I told him to open the register he said no. He was calm, even though I was wavin’ a SIG about. It was a replica, didn’t even fire it was so cheap. So I told him again, and he said no again. I asked why and he said he didn’t want to get into it.”

  Black laughed.

  “What kinda shit is that? ‘Didn’t want to get into it.’ ”

  “What did you do?” Black said, holding the smoke deep and feeling his lungs burn.

  “I left.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. I just got this feelin’ it was gonna go bad. Like this voice in the back of my head sayin’ ‘not this time, don’t push it this time.’ So we walked out nice and calm and that’s when I noticed the old man had a .22 in his hands, and it’d been pointin’ right back at me. His hand was low on the counter so I hadn’t noticed. He would’ve shot me, ain’t no doubting.”

  One of Joe’s men glanced over, Black met his eye and he looked away. They didn’t have a problem with Black, not really, they probably wanted to get home and get on but knew Joe would’ve done the same for each of them.

  “What if the King girl is connected to Summer?” Black said.

  “What if she is?”

  “Then Samson didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.”

  “You had time, Black. You got about as much an idea where to look as I have. Samson Lumen is the only lead. The only lead, you get that? I can find out if he knows somethin’. I can look him in the eye and ask him what happened to my daughter and he won’t be able to tell no lies.”

  They settled back into near silence, only the muttering of a few cameramen leaning against a news van reaching them.

  “Fuckin’ carnival time here,” Joe said. “I was thinkin’ about this cloud . . . the day it came.”

  Black glanced at him but Joe didn’t say nothing else.

  Black smoked to the end, dropped his cigarette to the grass, and stood. “That feelin’ you got, with the old man. That feelin’ that told you not to push. I got that same feelin’ now. If you push me on this I think somethin’ bad will happen.”

  “Shit, Black. Somethin’ bad already happened. Look around. Can’t you see that? I think about Summer, if she’s dead –”

  “You shouldn’t –”

  “If she’s dead did I do all I could for her? That’s a question you need to ask yourself too, Black.”

  *

  Black sat in his high-back chair and stared at the wall. With a trembling hand he cut her photograph out of the newspaper and rose and stuck Amber King’s pretty face beside the others. Briar girl number six. Or maybe number seven.

  He drank a bottle of Old Crow, the whole thing chugged like it weren’t nothing that could do him bad. His muscles were so tight he took Vicodin, laid the pills out in a long line like soldiers ready to die for him. He injected, between his toes where the skin had healed and healed. And then he wondered why he weren’t dead, why it took so fuckin’ much to take a man down. But he did swim, far across golden fields that shined up at him like the jeweled streets Pastor Lumen told of when he was a boy.

  That night was eternal. In his dreams he called on the churches, made hard pleas that fell on deaf ears. Keep the girls away from church till it’s over, till he’s caught. He saw Eliza, at the shiny Baptist church on Route 84, and she was calling on him but he couldn’t move ’cause he was so weighted now. He surfaced only once, and that was when the shrill jar of the telephone cut his dreams. It rang off and on for maybe minutes or hours.

  And then he woke to gentle knocking that he thought might’ve been in his mind. He sat up and knocked over the table with the bottles and the pills.

  He got to the kitchen and stumbled at the sink, ran the faucet and splashed cold water on his face. There was a mirror in the hallway and he didn’t look in it.

  He might’ve been all right, might’ve put it down to a blip on a long road that didn’t have no destination. But then he opened the door, and
he saw the mess that was her face.

  “Jesus, Peach,” he said. “Jesus, God.”

  “I tried to call you,” she said.

  39

  Summer

  Geraldo, that episode where they list the warnin’ signs your kid might be driftin’ toward Satanism. Abrupt emotional changes and rejection of parental values. I reckon being a teenager hadn’t never been more dangerous.

  In the spring of 1995 people began switching sides. All that interest in the devil, that Panic that ran roughshod, the FBI chalked much of the testimony to kids being led places they ain’t never been, false memories seeded and watered till morality itself was on trial. Devils were folk, stats were molded with frightening finesse.

  That shift changed everythin’ and nothin’. The Briar girls were still gone, whoever done it was still out there.

  When I left my house that night, bag weighin’ heavy on my shoulder ’cause I packed more than I reckoned I’d need, I felt close to Della Palmer and the others, like I was walking in their godly shoes, headin’ someplace I couldn’t never come back from.

  When I walked, I closed my eyes for a moment, and I told God what was comin’ and I dared him to intervene. I wondered what Bobby would say, and what Savannah would say, but it didn’t matter, not then and maybe not ever.

  *

  I noticed the van right off. It was creepin’, rollin’ slow on low revs. I didn’t glance back ’cause I knew who it was and who was comin’. I was chosen; Fuseli’s sleeper laid out, my throat bared white while the stallion looked on. The fear didn’t come then ’cause maybe I too was content in my nightmare.

  I reached the end of Lott and heard the engine loud, and then it died sudden as a car pulled over from Hutchinson Avenue.

  He drove an old station wagon. Maybe it was blue but I can’t recall the details ’cause salvation bowled me right off my feet.

  I got in quick and watched the van pass me by, my soul unclaimed.

  It was as I breathed deep and as he eased into first without sayin’ nothin’ that I realized what a cold hand destiny deals with. The vision, the appointed time, you can’t outrun none of it.

  *

  There ain’t no Scooby-Doo moment in my story.

  The bad guy ain’t wearin’ a disguise.