by T. Braddy
By the time I got home, it was late and I needed sleep. Paranoid, I took my time sliding the key in the lock before entering. It was not pleasant expecting the house to be ransacked, but surprisingly everything was in its place and every place was properly filled. Willie gave an irritated bark, and I let him wander the yard in search of new smells while the weight of the day descended upon me. It wasn’t the kind of heaviness I’d felt before, back in the Junction, but there was still something pressing down on me.
Willie didn’t seem to notice or care. He bounced around the yard, peeing on this and shitting on that. He was about twenty-five, thirty pounds, a mutt with so many sires I couldn’t even begin to describe his breeds. Terrier of some kind, if I had to guess. He was possessed of a mop of scraggly gray hair that made him look slightly wild and dangerous, a knife-wielding mugger of a canine. Crooked and missing teeth completed the look, and boy, was he unafraid of baring those jagged things. I’d fattened him up, though, and he no longer had that skinny, feral look about him. The look which had first led me to pour leftovers in a bowl and try to draw him from his hiding place in the woods.
When he was finished with his mission to mark the yard as his own, we slunk back into the house, and that’s when I felt it. Not a thing, at first, seemed to be out of place, but one of those hunches of mine overwhelmed me.
Someone had been here. Someone had walked the length and width of my house, and though I couldn’t prove it to the authorities, it was true.
The windows and doors were locked. There was no shattered glass. Nothing missing. But someone had been here.
I turned to the dog. “Why didn’t you tell me we had company?” His ears perked up, but then he just yawned disinterestedly and replaced his muzzle on his paws and closed his eyes.
Upon further inspection, I saw little things, things I wouldn’t have otherwise paid attention to, had they not been ever-so-slightly askew. I was by no means a neat freak, but I could sense that things had changed. I even got the distinct feeling I was being watched, so I didn’t freak out and do the thing I wanted to do, which was go and pull one particular item from its hiding place and check on it.
Instead, I walked with purpose to the back bedroom for my .45, which I stuffed into the back of my jeans. Heading outside, I peered into the darkness for some time.
Was it actually someone which had visited me, or something?
My past included some supernatural dealings, ones I wouldn’t discuss with anyone (save for maybe Deuce someday down the road) but I had hoped they were mostly over. Of course, at that point, I was putting down a fifth of Beam every few days, not to mention the number of accompanying beers.
I contemplated sanity as I made a circuitous round through the neighborhood. No ghosts. No killers. Just large swaths of darkness with a potential for danger. I’d taken the dog with me as a buffer against looking suspicious, but I’m sure I looked ridiculous. The gun was as visible as the dog, and a few times I caught myself peeking into the windshields of parked cars, looking for criminals dumb enough to hide in parked cars.
What should have I expected here? An ambush? The problem was, I didn’t know. Didn’t know who would want to fuck with me like this. Murder? Yeah. Torture? Most definitely. I was in on a lot of underhanded shit from my past, and someday I figured it would come back to haunt me. But nudging knicknacks out of place and leaving the place in disarray? I couldn’t quite see what the purpose of it would be. Gaslighting me would only apprise me to whatever was coming next, and surely they didn’t want that.
Unless it was the real thing. Could have been the truth. Could have been Vanessa making contact from well beyond the beyond. Her fingerprints were all over my life, and if Emmitt Laveau could find me, so could my fucking ex-wife. Unlikely, but hey, here’s to wishing.
I wasn’t being pulled into somebody else’s murder plot, so far as I knew, and there had been no nocturnal visits to sway me into picking up an investigation.
But this was no blues song, and I was no goddamned cop. I was a two-bit alcoholic with a knack for finding trouble where there wasn’t any before.
And yet.
And. Yet.
The case I had hidden was proof positive I wasn’t completely out. Even if I never spent a single solitary dime of that blood money, I was on the hook for it. Men wanted it back could have it, if they asked sweetly enough, but I don’t think they’d accept a simple apology for absconding down to Savannah with it.
Maybe it wasn’t the spirits that needed me this time around.
Maybe – just maybe – I needed them.
I put the .45 down and let Willie tug on a rope he had chewed nearly to pieces. At one point, he yanked it out of my hand and went galloping around the room with it, barking in the back of his throat. Then, he settled into a corner of the living room and kept gnawing on one end of it.
I got up, sighed, and stopped dead in my tracks.
I’d almost overlooked it, the thing which confirmed my suspicions. It lay on a shelf among my books, just as neat and unassuming as a ceramic figurine. Thing could have set on that very shelf for weeks – months, maybe – before I found it, had I not looked at it at that exact moment.
Willie looked up, whined, and went back to his chewing.
Only, this thing wasn’t just a memento left to manipulate me into contemplating my sanity. It was an outright threat. The dog barked once. “I know, big guy,” I said. “I don’t like it any more’n you do.”
It was a one-hundred-dollar bill, dipped in a substance red enough that it could be human blood. It had been folded up into the shape of a butterfly, the exact tattoo Vanessa had gotten inked just below her belt line.
This was going to be the beginning of something awful and violent. I just knew it.
fourth chapter
I didn’t call the cops. Of course I didn’t. Being a former police officer myself, I knew what they would think. Every town has them, the crazies who call the cops for entirely unrealistic reasons. People who think their neighbors are aliens, or that the people down the street are Russian spies. What would I say to make my claims stick? They’re moving my stuff around? No. They left a bloody hundred-dollar bill? That was a little better but not enough to make anything stick. I’d just look like an insane person, and I had no trouble with that.
Three questions lingered with me.
Was anything taken, anything of value?
Nope. Just moved around. Nothing you can do about that, I suppose. That’s barely a crime.
Do you fear for your life?
Yes, though no more than when I lived in my old hometown.
Why would someone want to do this to you?
A little more complicated question, bossman.
Truth be told, I had a few people who might be hounding me down, at this point. The grand finale that had led to my exit from Lumber Junction was a swath of destruction and death rivaling the Son of Sam murders in their heinousness. Men burned alive. Others drowned. Some bumped-and-dumped in an old truck. More or less a massacre.
Several players were involved in this quaint game of ten little Indians.
There was the Brickmeyer family, whose paternal lineage had been snuffed out in mere hours. Jeffrey and Leland were the only dangerous ones, but they were dead. A couple of reporters had sniffed me out in the wake of their funerals, trying to pick up on the massive amounts of dirt that lay in the family’s closets, but I somehow managed to sidestep the rest. So far, the rest of the family had remained silent, but that probably had to do with the intense scrutiny the Brickmeyer name had endured in the wake of the murders in Lumber Junction. Now that things had died down, I wouldn’t be surprised if a target had since been drawn on my back.
There was also the Bullen family, whose dirty, vile clan consisted of some distant relatives that I’d heard were dangerous. Hell, if the name Bullen stood for anything, it was violence. They were big, brutish, backwoods people - not the kind of people who would play mind games. Lumbering rednecks don’t
break into your house and make origami. They come right through the front door, wielding shotguns. And just because they hadn’t sought retribution yet, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t.
Still, Ronald and H.W. had been buried in a family cemetery without much ceremony – I don’t know how many people showed up – so I wasn’t sure how much the meth-addled family would care about their deaths. Ron, at least, had attempted to right the ship of his life toward the end, and was unceremoniously set on fire for his trouble. H.W. got plugged and dumped in a pond, and nobody seemed to notice he’d died. Even his hooker girlfriend had moved on in the days or hours following the discovery of his body.
And then there was the Vanessa thing, the hardest for me to wrap my head around. My knowledge of why she had fled her former life was vague but complete enough for me to keep a full clip nearby at all times.
It seemed as though her tangential involvement with some sort of southern drug operation had ended poorly. I’m not sure she was selling drugs or moving them for her boyfriend, but she had something to do with it, and she had fled, rightly fearing for her life.
When she split on me and our marriage, Savannah was the place she called home. For a while. It seemed to be a gas station to fuel her drug addiction, and that was where she met her shithead boyfriend, a formerly successful guy gliding into his own abyss of self-loathing. They did a shitload of drugs and started to get involved in the trade, which took her to Atlanta. Together, they tried to hit bottom, and he managed to succeed shortly before she did. He got capped for his trouble, and Vanessa fled back to the Junction to hide out and hope she wasn’t next.
Before she bottomed out and ended her own life, she’d told me some pretty hair-raising tales about her experiences down here. Lots of drugs. Lots of parties. Plenty of unsavory characters flowing in and out of her life. Some important, some not. Drug dealers are not known for their magnanimity, so if she had stepped on any toes in her rounds on the meth tour of Savannah, I was the proxy who could pay her moral debts.
But Vanessa. Vanessa had put me into her world of hurt, and this was the icing on the fucking cake. After skating out on our marriage, she had gradually found herself in the middle of some legit trouble. At first it was to be with her not-so-secret lover: her addiction. From what had made it back to the Junction, she had gone on a pretty hellish bender of drug and alcohol use for a few months, and it had pulled her into a seedy underbelly of the drug trade in Savannah. Lots of dealers and hangers-on, that sort of thing. She’d slipped into her habit like a skinny dress after a cleanse, and it had brought her full-frontal with the kinds of people who’d ended up pushing her back into the hole of her hometown.
Finally, there was the briefcase.
It was the primary reason I wouldn’t go to the cops. And even though I was pretty sure I had a handle on what was inside, I hadn’t yet opened the damned thing.
Stupid, I know. Might be empty, for chrissakes. Might be a cosmic joke, since it could end up getting me killed.
It was a puzzle piece without a place on the board. Had she taken a case full of money with the intention of spending it? Was she just hiding out, using me until the heat was off of her?
Had she taken it because she thought it was owed to her? Was it something she’d done while geeked out on speed and later come to regret?
And how in the hell did she manage to steal money from a bunch of drug dealers?
They were questions I’d not be able to ask her, so they would go unanswered until maybe I met up with her in an “I’ll Fly Away” kind of scenario. Or until the interested parties stopped fucking around and just kicked in my door.
If only I had found this weird little case before she’d died. I might be in possession of a more definitive answer. Who knows – in that scenario, the discovery of the briefcase might have set off a chain reaction which would have ended with Van in rehab or back with her parents instead of six feet deep. Or if I hadn’t moved away - at least then, I’d be blind to its existence.
Cops, though – absolutely not. The wrong questions would be asked. I could answer them, though not in a satisfactory way. I knew this because I had been a cop. A shitty one, but a cop nevertheless. Even if I went to the the police, I’d have to conjure up some unimaginably disreputable tale, full of inventions no one in their right mind would believe.
Maybe I’m being wrongly targeted, I’d say. A highly particular kind of thief is on my case. I’m the victim of a very specific form of terrorism. I’m afraid I’m being stalked.
Even if they found the guy, what then? They manage to tag him, and he says something about a suitcase full of drug money I was hanging onto. Shit, the case existed due to illegal dealings in the first place. What reason would there be for wanting to keep the matter private? If you’re the dealer’s hired Rottweiler, what does it matter if the money gets taken? It’s moved beyond mere negotiation. If I get my name in the papers or in a jail cell, I’m a dead fucking man. Call it dirt-thirty.
If I turned myself in, turned the case in, the questions would get no easier.
What do you mean, you didn’t open the suitcase?
Why did you bring it with you?
You’re telling me that you kept this thing shut, and yet you have nothing to do with it?
I’d never been involved in this kind of “lost money” scenario, but I had read A Simple Plan. I was well prepped on how these things went down. I’d not end up with my freedom, but a complicated and prolonged incarceration. Felonies galore, not to mention the fact that I’d likely be shivved in prison.
And the money? It would disappear, just up and get taken from the evidence room without so much as a mouse fart of protest. I’d be dead, the money would go back to its “rightful” owners. Everything is well and good with the world.
No way. Uh-unh.
This was the sort of thing that required guns.
So I was going to prepare myself.
fifth chapter
While I waited for the bottom to fall out, I kept on going about my business. The girl from the meeting, Allison, proposed I go to a party with her, which seemed weird considering we met at AA. But she swore up and down it would be an okay time, and she had this way of being convincing when it suited her.
“They won’t hold you down and do body shots out of your belly button,” she said, smiling in a way I found both refreshing and kind of heartbreaking.
“Oh, no? Then what the hell would I want to be there for?”
Her laugh was a cacophonous roar, a smattering of gunfire that ended with a hitching gulp of air. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe they could be persuaded.”
She was aggressively friendly, and she talked enough that when I didn’t want to I didn’t have to do anything but sit and listen.
“Aw, come on. It’ll be fun, and even if it isn’t, at least you get to spend some time trying to keep me on the straight and narrow.”
“Is that something you need?”
“And I think it’ll take a whole lot more than you to accomplish it, McKane. Come to the party. It’s not even really a party. Just some weirdos going to a friend of mine’s house, that’s all.”
I was sitting on the porch, petting Willie, who lay near-comatose at my feet. I looked down at him, and his eyes shifted disinterestedly up at me. I mouthed the words what do you think at him, and he gave an apathetic sigh.
“Oh, all right,” I said. “So long as I’m not walking into an ambush.”
“It’s the plots of From Dusk ‘Til Dawn and Texas Chainsaw Massacre combined.”
“I’m more worried about it turning out like Deliverance.”
“So you’re not a stick in the mud, after all.”
“Only after midnight.”
* * *
She picked me up from my house a little after seven and drove out of the city at a speed matching her conversational style. I thought about each and every lock in my house as she talked some more about her past. I was certain I’d locked everything up, and l
ike a chaperone on a high school trip, I had placed masking tape over the windows and doors. I wanted to see how this guy was getting into my house, and I hoped that if it happened again, the idea that I, too, definitely knew would scare him off.
Probably not.
Meanwhile, Allison had begun to delve into the psychology behind her addiction. She talked without pause, and almost without thought, even though what she said was logical and seemingly well-reasoned.
“I think I just need somewhere to go, you know,” she said. “For some people, it’s having a drink to drink, something to hold and bring up to their lips to deal with the social anxiety. They think they need to be a little tipsy to be their best selves. Me, I think it’s the place. I need to be somewhere. A location to feel a part of something. It’s not enough I don’t drink; I like to be places. Drinking or not, the world feels a whole lot better in the company of other partiers.”
She took a breath, seemed to realize she was monologuing, and leaned back against the ragged driver’s seat of her car. She glanced over at me.
I thought about what she said. “The things drove me to drink – I don’t think there’s a substitution for them. It’s something inside me makes me belly-up at a bar, and it ain’t so simple a thing that can be explained by a simple psychological trick of the mind. and it can’t be solved by replacing it with water or soda or with running.”
“But isn’t that what you’re doing to keep from drinking?” she asked.
She had me there.
“Yeah, I reckon,” I replied. “I reckon so.”
“Don’t let me step on what you were saying, though. I don’t mean to keep you from your truth. Or whatever. Maybe you’ve unlocked something that’s eluded me so far.”
“It’s nothing that hard. No drinks, one day at a time. Whatever keeps you sober. It just isn’t the fix. The fix is something else, and our neuroses – or whatever – need more attention than distraction. That’s why I think most people don’t end up kicking for good. But the meetings help.”
