by J. A. Kerley
“Keep your hands outta my head, Brother,” I said, backing my symbolic missile with the most potent digital icon in American culture.
When I stepped back inside I felt fifty pounds lighter, like a leaden yoke had melted from my shoulders. “Pour the cognac,” I said, stepping to Cherry and no longer wondering who was talking.
She lifted a perplexed eyebrow. “Are you all right?”
“I had a simple ritual to perform. Like an exorcism.”
“Uh, do you always—”
I pressed my finger to her lips, stilling them. The sensation of warmth was exquisite. “My own small skylift ritual. I had something bothering me, but it fell away.” I withdrew my finger, reluctantly.
“When you put it in those terms, I think I understand.” She lifted her glass. “Shall we drink to solving the case?”
“No,” I corrected. “Let’s drink to us.”
We clicked glasses. The cognac was dizzying in my head, distilled manna aged in oak and leather. We next raised our glasses to the tan hat of our cognac-giving benefactor, Horace T. Cherry, staring dark-eyed from the photo centering the wall of pictures and weird objects. We set the glasses on the table and sat on the couch, almost touching. I’m sure I heard her bees buzzing.
My cellphone rasped from my pocket. I rolled my eyes and answered.
“This is Heywood Williams,” an elderly male voice said, loud, like a guy with hearing problems. “I’m manager of the Pumpkin Patch Campground. We got a dog running loose around here matches the description on a poster one of the Woslee cops dropped off.”
“The dog’s a big guy?” I asked. “Kinda odd-looking?”
“I guess. Odd looks different to different people. Big ol’ boy. Friendly.”
I took the address, clear on the other side of the Gorge. I’d already had several calls, able to figure out it wasn’t Mix-up by questioning the caller. But this call had promise.
“I heard,” Cherry said as I dropped the phone back in my pocket. “Go, Carson. I hope it’s Mix-up. But even if it isn’t, I’m still hopeful, right?”
She stood on her toes and gave me a millisecond’s kiss on my lips, more dizzying by far than the cognac.
Chapter 34
The Pumpkin Patch Campground was twenty minutes distant. I drove past the campground sign, pumpkin-shaped and promising hookups, fire pits and a dumping station. Mr Williams was reading a newspaper in a folding chair beside a small wooden kiosk where guests checked in. He was somewhere in his seventies, wearing a pumpkin-colored porkpie hat and Bermuda shorts.
“I’m sorry,” Williams said sheepishly. “The dog belonged to a group of campers. I hadn’t seen it when they checked in.”
He pointed to a bright recreational vehicle across a small park area. The family – husband, wife, three smallish kids – were still setting up, the husband on the roof of the vehicle passing lawn chairs down to the wife as a huge shaggy dog with some resemblance to Mix-up frisked at the wife’s ankles.
Williams was a chatty guy and since he’d made a valiant effort on my behalf, I kept him company for a few minutes, talking about the weather and his work.
“We got twenty sites for RVs,” he related proudly. “Full hookups. And another dozen sites for tent campers.”
“Must keep you busy.”
“Busy enough. People drive in, stay a night or two, head off to another place. Easy to do when you’re driving a box filled with all the comforts of home.”
I saw a big recreational vehicle that had recently pulled in for the night; hooked to the towbar behind it was a Mazda compact.
“Do many people pull cars with them?” I asked, killing time.
“Sure. So they can move around locally with less gas. If a big RV is like planting your house anywhere you want, having a car is like bringing your garage along as well.”
“Are there many RV campgrounds in the area?”
“Depends what you mean. There’s maybe five or six real near the Gorge. Add another thirty miles to the circle and you get a bunch more. Plus some folks have acreage set up to hold a few RVs to make a little pin money.”
I studied nearby RVs, saw three more with towing packages. It hit me that the set-up was the perfect mobile hideaway, especially with props like bikes and boats and fishing rods. A recreational vehicle could be moved from campsite to campsite, hard to track. They offered a place to plot, to change disguise, to sneak in under cover of dark, tear a body apart, pack it with manure. There was also the image: recreational vehicles were the happy whales of the road, friendly and benign, filled with cheery families and retired couples. Mad killers drove rusty vans and dark, low-slung sedans with obsidian windows.
I recalled the words of Gable Paltry, the scruffy old voyeur who scanned the parking lot behind the funeral home where Tanner’s body had been stolen.
“I saw me a big a RV pull in … Stayed maybe ten minutes. Light color. Had bikes and crap roped to the back. A barbecue grill tied up top, too.”
I asked Williams if I could wander the campground and, sauntering from site to site, I looked at the bright machines, seeing families and children and several RVs with no one around, owners out hiking or kayaking the river or sightseeing.
When I left Pumpkin Patch, my mind was fixated on the possibility of RVs as hideouts – not just this case, but for future reference. I passed another such campground and pulled in to take a look. That led to a third such place, the Haunted Hollow Campground. The campground was up by Frenchburg, high on the northwest side of the Gorge area. The murders and bulk of the investigation had occurred on the eastern side.
I parked near the entrance and wandered past the twenty or so sites. The lot, thick with trees, was tucked back in a verdant hollow – haunted, presumably – with a small creek singing merrily alongside. It didn’t seem a place where a killer would tuck down and think murderous thoughts.
I scanned RV after RV, seeing occupants, or swimsuits drying on a line, or hearing voices from inside, doors open wide to accept the cooling air of dusk. At the end of the road was a huge cream-colored RV resembling a vacation on wheels, bikes parked against the rear wheel, man’s, woman’s, a couple kid’s bikes. Two short recreational kayaks were strapped atop the vehicle, plus a plane-sized inner tube for playing in the water. The tips of fishing rods pressed against a back window. The shades were drawn and no one seemed inside.
I wandered to the rear and saw the requisite bumper stickers: Smoky Mountains, Everglades National Park, the Ozarks, a dozen or so. The stickers looked new and I wondered if the vehicle’s owner or owners were recent retirees.
The vehicle had both a tow bar and a rack holding a Kawasaki dirt bike, a big one. The distance from the ground to the rack was twenty or so inches and I figured it took a couple people to grunt the motorcycle into the rack. Or one strong one.
Turning away, a motion at a rear window caught my eye, a curtain shifting perhaps. Or a motion behind it. I stared for several seconds and saw nothing, recalling a classic bumper sticker admonition:
Don’t Come Knockin’ When This Van’s A-rockin’.
Hoping my nosy wanderings hadn’t disturbed anyone’s merrymaking, I retreated to my car, shooting backwards glances at the RV and wondering if my imagination was running past the red line.
I started back to my cabin, but being cloistered with my thoughts seemed claustrophobic so, for a few minutes at least, I drove where the roads led me, restless, thinking that maybe if I gave Mix-up a little more time, he’d be at the cabin when I returned, nose-nudging his food bowl my way as though nothing had happened.
Dusk was thickening and I saw headlights behind me, but they dissolved into the distance. I drove westward, windows down, as night fell deep into the valleys. The road straightened for a moment and I saw the headlights again, closer, the vehicle moving at speed. To my left I saw a Forest Service road and pulled from the main road, wanting to find a bit of calm before returning to the cabin.
I heard a slow rumble through the mounta
ins as I stepped from my truck and stretched my back. It was distant thunder, the promised front approaching. But for now the moonlight was bright enough to light the trail.
I started walking, right away stepping into a spider web. I brushed it from my face, recalling McCoy’s observation regarding a second traveler on the Rock Bridge trail. I was a half-mile down the trail when I heard a car door close somewhere to my right. My parking area was behind me, the other vehicle at another trail access; kids, I figured, kissing or sipping beer in the dark.
Two minutes later I heard a limb stepped on, the sound from my side quadrant. I gauged the distance as two or three hundred feet.
After a few seconds, I heard a second footfall. Then, a third.
I nearly called out a plaintive Hello, but stopped myself. If I could hear their footfalls, surely the other person had heard mine. It seemed odd that in the hundreds of square miles of the local forest, two people had chosen this section as a nighttime venue.
The night bloomed darker and I looked above to see a cloud covering the white face of the moon. The cloud sifted free and moonlight blazed so white as to feel hot on my neck. To my right I heard an odd sound, like tape being stripped from a roll.
I was craning my ear that direction when a bullet slapped a tree four feet to my right. I dove to the ground, heart racing.
At first, no sound. Then a voice in the dark.
“Here coppie, coppie, coppie,” it crooned, as if calling a dog, a high and metal-raspy voice. Another pop. The bullet sizzled past my ear.
The voice was unforgettable. I’d heard it once at a brief prison interview, once at a hypnosis session turned sour: Bobby Lee Crayline.
Bobby Lee Crayline?
For one horrible second it occurred that speaking of him recently, figuring out his escape in Alabama, had worked black magic, that I had conjured him into my life like a demon from hell.
I breathed away the irrational and started running low, tough enough when the moon was out, impossible when clouds passed between us. My feet snagged roots and vines, stumbled over rocks. I stepped on limbs that cracked like firecrackers, ran headlong into low branches.
Why is Crayline here? my mind kept saying. Why is he trying to kill me?
The clouds released the moon and I was spotlit on the trail. Another shot from Crayline. A rifle that sounded somehow blunted and dull.
“Here, coppie, coppie, coppie …”
The forest went black. I crouched and waited for the moon to light the path. It blazed and I moved forward, staying low, the trail a maze of shadows. I heard Crayline angling behind me. I had left my weapon tucked in a closet in the cabin. Sweat dripped from my forehead, my heart seemed to engulf my chest. I could find no avenue to set an ambush.
The moon poked through again. The trail veered into rhododendron and all I saw was rock and more rock, rising into the night sky until it disappeared into black. I had no escape route left. I had come to the end of a hollow, a box canyon.
I heard laughter at my back, a hundred feet? Less? Bobby Lee Crayline was moving with caution, tree to tree. Safe in the cover of the hemlocks and pines, he had only to slowly advance until I was in his sights.
I was in the point of a V, with nowhere to go. Nowhere at all.
Up, said a voice in my head. There’s nothing left but up.
Chapter 35
I craned my head back as the moon shone through a wisp of cloud. Four stories above me in the sandstone I saw a hueco – Spanish for “hole” – a depression eroded into the cliff face, common in the sandstone cliffs. I heard a trampled branch, a crunch in the black air. Crayline had moved one tree closer. He was silent now, fully focused on gliding in for the kill.
I looked back to the cliff face. There was cover of a dozen feet of rhododendron before I’d be lit bright on the sandstone. Sweat stinging my eyes, I hid my shoes under leaves and leapt on to the rock, hand grabbing upward at a small shelf. I missed, tumbling to the ground. My clothes were binding me and I stripped to skivvies and pulled off my socks. I hid the clothes with my shoes.
I leapt again and made the jump, fingers holding. I pulled, straining, until my scrambling toes found purchase.
A dull pop and I heard lead splat against the cliff a dozen feet away. Crayline was guessing at my position, firing blind into the point of the V. The moon broke through the clouds and the world turned spotlight white for twenty seconds. I saw a vertical crack, used it to pull ten feet higher, leaves tickling at my back. I emerged above the rhododendron, now an easy target on the cliff face.
The moon disappeared and I recognized the impossibility of my task. The only way to see hand and footholds was in the moonlight. But the same light displayed me like I was centering a snow-white screen at a movie theater.
The moon filtered through a thin cloud and I saw a handhold two feet above me. My feet scrabbled, found purchase. I brought my right foot to the tiny outcrop now holding my hand. With my foot secured, I slipped my hand away, slapped it upward. My face pressed into the stone. Even my breath was an enemy, inflating my chest, pushing my center of balance back an inch or so. I heard Crayline move another tree closer, the sound now as much below as behind. I prayed his upward view was cluttered by limbs or brush.
I saw another hold four feet up and three laterally, a handhold no larger than a pack of cigarettes. An impossible move, almost, the edge of my limits.
The world went black, a thick cloud rolling over the moon. Come back! my mind screamed at the moon. I need you!
I froze against the sandstone, heart pounding in pitch-black. I heard a gnome in my head: Gary, my rock-climbing instructor. Make the move before you make the move, he constantly lectured, promoting visual and physical visualization. I pictured the rock’s surface, the small holds I needed to catch, felt how it would feel to make the move.
I launched myself upward, exploding like a coiled spring, scrabbling for something only seen in my mind, feeling nothing, then …
My right index and forefinger fell atop a one-inch outcrop, left toe on a tiny shelf, the rest of me stretched tight between hand and foot.
Another shot from Crayline, a dull pop aimed into the rhododendron below. The moon returned. To my right, waist-level, I saw a small stone rumple that might hold a foot. My fingers burned, shivered, muscles filling with lactic acid, strength dying away. I checked the position of the rumple, brought my leg up … easy, easy … Visualize as the moon tucked under cloud. See the move and … Got it! I pulled upward with every ounce of strength, sweat searing my eyes.
“Here, coppie, coppie, coppie …”
Crayline returned to the taunt, trying to spook me into making a move, but still looking for me at ground level. He was almost to the cliff. I tried to pull up another few inches for stability but my toehold crumbled into dust, my foot kicking wildly. My body canted sideways, falling, hands flailing uselessly, slapping at the rock, falling, goddammit it’s over why now falling …
My fingers slammed something pushing from the rock. A metal circle. I grabbed. My fingers howled in pain, but held.
It was a bolt. A freaking BOLT!
I’d found a regular climbing route, a path pioneered up the cliff. The rock had been drilled, bolts jammed in to hold safety ropes affixed to harnesses.
I had no rope. No harness. No chalk to enhance my grip. But I was on a pre-built route. The moon blazed again, white light now revealing the series of bolts above me, tiny lighthouses in the rock. I tried to recall everything Gary had taught me. Every move. Every technique.
The moon fled. I dangled one-handed from the bolt for several seconds until my feet found holds. My hands patted rock above, knowing the metal circles were there, waiting. I found one and grunted upward, crossing my body length through the dark in seconds.
Moon. I looked up and saw the dark hueco just feet above me, beside a cleft in the rock. I heard a muffled pop and the stone inches beside me splintered. Seen! I held my scream of terror and pulled for the hueco like a man swimming vertical
ly, waiting for the second shot.
I tumbled into the hueco seconds later. Below me I heard cursing and the sound of stripping tape. I realized Crayline was using a soft-drink silencer – an empty plastic bottle duct-taped over the weapon’s muzzle – to blunt the shot’s sound. A fresh bottle had to be taped on for each shot.
Crayline knew an open gunshot could carry for miles. But the semi-silenced shots sounded numb and inconclusive, liable to be mistaken for a falling branch if noticed at all. He probably had a backpack full of bottles.
Another pop. The bullet whanged off the roof of the hueco, buried in the dust three inches from my knee. I rolled against the rear of the hole and tucked fetus-tight. “HELP!” I yelled into the night, hoping the cavity performed like a giant megaphone. “HELP! CALL THE POLICE!”
I heard my words echo back to me, no idea if they were carrying a hundred feet or a thousand yards.
“HELLLLLLP!”
I screamed for two more minutes, until I saw a flashlight through the trees, moving quickly away. Crayline had decided it wasn’t worth the risk. I watched his light diminish until I knew I was out of range. I crawled into the crevice at the side of the hueco, wormed the final dozen feet to the ridge and circled toward my truck.
Rain had started when I found it an hour later, shoeless and limping from countless stumbles, listening into the dark before I approached. I tried my phone, but recalled the nearest cell tower was miles away and this section of the forest was a dead zone.
I fired up the engine but kept the lights off, snapping them on only when shadows indicated I might be nearing a precipice. I was afraid Crayline was lurking in the trees. I continued several miles until the service road intersected two-lane. I was still deep in the backcountry, but felt safer using headlights and speed. The rain escalated as I tapped a phone button, finding no reception. I flicked on the dome light and checked between the map and the road. Cherry’s home was about three miles away.
