The Hundredth Man

by J. A. Kerley

  “I’m growing, Mama. Look.”

  Nelson’s flat stomach turned into the more muscled abdomen of Deschamps. Nelson’s thigh became the thicker thigh of Deschamps.

  “Uh-oh, Mama,” Lindy’s voice challenged, “you better watch out now.”

  Nelson’s shoulders ballooned as if by magic, gaining weight and definition.

  “My God,” Harry said. “It’s a revenge fantasy.”

  Ava/ Mama cobbled-together words: “Don’t, Will. You’re scaring me. Don’t scare me.”

  “You think you’re scared now, Mama, watch this.” Triumph rang in Lindy’s voice.

  The screen went dark and the eerie sounds grew deeper and more rhythmic. The screen lightened to a shot of Burlew’s power lifter body, thick and defined, the boulder chest, the ham biceps. Then a montage of the body from several angles. Dozens of shots squeezed into a few seconds, the camera zooming in as though drawn against the body.

  “No. Will. Don’t. I’m scared.”

  “It’s your turn now, Mama.”

  A close-up of lips recalled the beginning of the video: Lindy’s wet mouth spitting out words: “Did you ever think I’d come for you, Mama?”

  Ava’s voice contorted through a mishmash of jammed-together vowels, an ugly choking sound, the ees from “Pee.” The hollow o’s of “Boston.” The long o’s of “Kokomo.” The city names had provided both needed syllables and a diversion.

  “.. . ahhhh-oooaa-uu … Don’t … please …”

  A cut to Lindy’s face, half in dark, a wild grin beneath blazing eyes, his hands gesturing the viewer into the picture.

  “… oo … ahh … oooaauuhh …”

  “Pain makes us pure, Mama.”

  “.. . eeee-aa-ooo-ahhh … Will…”

  “I will save you, Mama.”

  “.. . oooooaaaaeee “

  The screen abruptly snapped into black and the sound cut off. A white hiss of blank tape filled the room.

  Harry said, “What happened? The tape bust?”

  “No,” I said slowly, my mind watching another set of invisible lines push from the dark. “It’s lacking the final scene. The climax.”

  “Mama’s death.”

  “Damn you, Jeremy. Damn you to hell and back,” I whispered at the empty screen, suddenly knowing why I’d escaped his room unscathed.

  Harry said, “What, Carson?”

  “Jeremy couldn’t see who the killer was, but he saw who it wasn’t,” I said, recalling Jeremy’s study of the police reports and interviews, his pinpoint-focus mind deciphering the minutia. I heard him rant at Ava when she’d suggested his input had saved lives.

  “You see it as saving lives, witch. I see it as BETRAYING JOEL ADRIAN!”

  I recalled the ease with which he manipulated me toward the innocent Caulfield, and the willingness with which I went.

  I said, “Jeremy read the material and discovered or suspected the killer was on a mother-dominated mission of revenge or whatever. My brother saw the killer as a kindred spirit. He also saw that Caulfield didn’t fit the mindset.”

  Comprehension dawned in Harry’s eyes. “So Jeremy aimed you at Caulfield to give the real killer time to fulfill his mission, to put Mama in the movie. Jeremy didn’t burn you because …”

  I nodded. “Because he didn’t fulfill his end of the bargain. He misdirected me instead.”

  “And now Lindy’s somewhere with … Mama,” Harry whispered. “Completing the fantasy.”

  I slammed my fist against the table, a gesture as futile as wafting off a storm with a paper fan.

  “What will Lindy do?” Harry said. We sat in the car with no idea of direction. I braced my feet on the floor and tumbled twenty years back. Threat. Storm. What to do? Daytime: Run to the oak in the woods, climb to my fort. Wait. Night: Slide out the window, creep to the car.

  I knew what he’d do: It was in me too.

  “He’ll go where he feels safe, Harry his version of a tree-house. I’ve got to find out what that is.”

  “Will he race to to finish the movie?”

  “He’s never rushed anything. We’ve got that.”

  Was I lying to myself? But Lindy had spent hundred of hours stalking his victims, combing through videotape, selecting scenes, stitching them into a five-minute crazy-quilt of retribution. No. He’d want his moment of confrontation to linger. As long as he felt safe. That meant no standoffs, no rushing attacks, no SWAT teams roaring up in a scream of lights and sirens and bullhorns. That would only accelerate his mad agenda. Yet when it was finished I suspected he could run laughing into a hail of fire and metal, pain and death nothing more than pixels on a TV screen.

  But first we had to find him. What had Ms. Clay said? No. What had Mrs. Benoit said?

  Bows.

  Bows. I recalled Mrs. Benoit’s growing turmoil as we talked with her niece. Bows. She’d gotten excited whenever someone had said Lindy’s name. Said, bows. Or something. “Back to the motel, Harry,” I said. “Crank it,” I added, needlessly.

  CHAPTER 34

  I sat on the bed beside Ms. Benoit and laid my hand over her knee, a walnut under a blanket. She was still smoking and watching TV, oblivious to anyone else in the universe. I shifted closer until I was staring into her diluted eyes.

  “Will Lindy,” I said. “Willy.”

  Her mouth formed a pucker and released the word “Bows.”

  “Where’s Willy, Mrs. Benoit?”

  She leaned to one side and craned her face toward the TV. I moved between them. “Willy,” I repeated. “Will Lindy. Where’s Willy?”

  “Bows,” she said, more forcefully.

  “Will Lindy!” I yelled into her face, hoping volume would align her shifting plates of memory. Ms. Clay wrung her hands but didn’t intervene.

  “Bows,” Mrs. Benoit said to me. Her hand shot to my face like a brittle claw and held tight. I tried to picture what she was seeing. She had lived beside the Lindys. On the Tombigbee River. Farmhouse. Outbuilding. Field. Trees. What else had I seen in Ms. Clay’s photos? Water. The boat hulls in the tree line.

  “Boats?” I asked Ms. Clay, her aunt’s nails digging into my face.

  Ms. Clay whispered across the room. “On back of the Lindy property by the river. Two old rotting boats, fishing boats I think, the ones with the big arms coming away from them? Nets? One was on its side, a rust shell. The other was upright, stuck in the mud. They’re long gone, but maybe that’s where he hid when he got the chance.”

  I nodded. “Boats?” I asked Mrs. Benoit. My eyes stared from between her fingers. She leaned forward until electric springs of white hair grazed my forehead. Her teeth clicked as she spat slurred words into my face.

  “Tha crazy-eyed … li’l monkey … was always hiding … in them fucking … bows.”

  Two major rivers empty into Mobile Bay, the Mobile and the Tensaw. Between and surrounding them is the second-largest river delta in the country tens of thousands of acres of marsh and swamp and bottomland, gators and snakes, relentless clouds of hungry insects. We slogged upriver at maybe twenty knots, all I could wrench from the big Merc with this much water surging back at us. I cocked my head down to keep the bill of my cap between the rain and my eyes. I was damn glad the boat had been blessed. Jabbing hard ahead with my finger, I yelled, “Watch the water, Harry!”

  “For what?”

  “Logs, stumps. Anything. Yell it out.”

  The same storm that Ava and I had made love in had moved northwest and bumped a front stretching down from Canada. The storm had stalled, spending three days flooding the upper portion of the Mobile River system’s 44,000-square-mile watershed. A second storm moved in behind it, the one pounding us now. Harry yelled, pointed. A tumbling snarl of uprooted tupelo raced at our bow. I jerked the wheel. Tendrils screeched down the hull. Harry closed his eyes and whispered to himself.

  Working with the county cops, MPD quickly discovered Lindy had sunk a goodly portion of his $73,000 annual salary into land. Seven parcels in Baldwin Cou
nty, five in Mobile County. It took a gut-snarling two hours to identify the parcels and outline them on a map. Most seemed speculator parcels, raw acres in the middle of nowhere waiting for sprawl to bring developers to the door, paying dollars over dimes. More of Lindy’s long-range planning. Teams of cops were spreading onto the parcels now, moving low, bristling with armaments.

  Way up the Mobile River was Lindy’s only parcel on water, two acres in the middle of nowhere with fifty yards of river frontage. There’d be a fish-camp shack, maybe. Or a boat. I was rolling the dice he’d be on water; it was his retreat, his sanctuary. We could have come in from the land side, but the map showed it tough slogging even for an ATV, slough and marsh. The weather was too wild for a chopper.

  We’d asked only for the boat and the command staff gave it readily, happy to concentrate on their heavy-assault strategies, figuring Lindy would never head to his most inaccessible piece of land. Most suspected he was already in Mississippi or Florida and making survival choices based on logic and planning. To me he was years of sizzling wires checked only by paper-thin insulation. Seeing Ava had peeled the insulation away like dead skin, leaving loose wires sparking and crackling and making random and mystifying connections.

  “We’ll never get there if you slam into something,” Harry yelled. “Can you cut it back a little?”

  I looked at him. Caution wasn’t a Harryism.

  “I can’t swim,” he said, looking away.

  The boat slapped a standing wave and for a moment we were airborne. Harry clawed at the windscreen as we slammed down and continued grinding upriver. I kept one eye on the water while scrabbling through the under seat storage. I found a bouyancy vest and threw it to him.

  “Got a plan?” he yelled, squeezing into a ridiculous yellow vest at least two sizes too small.

  “It’ll be full dark in a half hour. I’m hoping he’s running power from a generator. Making noise. We’ll slip up and take him down.”

  “If he’s there.”

  “It’s his tree fort, Harry. He’s there.”

  “It’s raining, Mama. Remember how you love the rain?”

  The interior of the shrimp boat was dry, the rotting overhead replaced, joints caulked. It was a small craft, a thirty-six-foot wooden box perched on wormy four-by-four’s, three hundred feet from the river, a hundred from the silted side channel. The boat was surrounded by trees, almost hidden.

  The low-roofed central cabin was large enough to accommodate the bright metal table. Belowdecks was the heavy bank of car batteries for power. He had a gasoline generator for charging the batteries; he’d run it yesterday, all was set. The TV, a thirty-two-inch flat screen sitting on a shelf at the back of the cabin, wasn’t as large as he wanted, but a person couldn’t have it all. A drive-in-sized screen would have been perfect, bolt Mama to the hood of her old Buick and park her front-row center.

  Lights, camera and … Look how I’m changing since you left, Mama! I can save you!

  Mama was strapped to the table at her neck, wrists, and ankles. He’d had to leave her belly open, of course, though it gave him pause; Mama was strong as a bear when she got her blood up. He’d doubled the other straps just to be safe.

  Lindy’s hands began tearing open the dress, shredding it away. Mama was beginning to stir and moan. Now was when he’d have to be most careful. The police were out there somewhere, but compared to Mama’s powers they were ants on the far side of the world.

  Mama’s breasts quivered in her bra as he pulled remnants of dress from beneath her. He let his eyes roam her skin and heard the bad girl inside her begin singing. He hummed loudly to blot it from his head. MMMMmmmmm. This was when Mama was most dangerous. MMMMMmmmmmmmm.

  Willet Lindy hummed louder as he aimed the TV at the autopsy table and began wiring his magic show together.

  The rain fell heavier as the light faded. Visibility was failing and disappeared entirely when blasts of wind threw rain into my eyes. I glanced at the river chart; we were close. I didn’t want to overshoot Lindy’s place and alert him to someone on the river. We were the only boat I’d seen since leaving the bay.

  “Carson!”

  Harry jabbed his finger ahead. I looked up to see a silver ramp charging our hull. I reflexively cut the wheel, but there was no way to miss it. An explosive whump and we skidded sidelong up the ramp, seeing water and then only tumbling sky. The engine roared as the boat pitched on its side and the disintegrating prop cleared the water. Sheared metal whipped the air like bullets. Brown water slashed over the gunwales. The boat roared onto the bank with a squeal of agonized metal and stopped dead, canted high on its side, lodged in mud. I pulled myself upright with the wheel. The only sound I heard was the rain. There was no Harry.

  “Harry? Harry!”

  I heard sloshing. “Damn. I can’t walk.”

  I stumbled aft and saw Harry wading in from the river, struggling through the hard laminar flow at his legs. My feet slid over the side and I sank to my ankles in black muck. I struggled to Harry and pulled him to the bank.

  “What the hell happened?” He said, wiping his eyes with a sodden sleeve. “I got flipped straight up and the next thing I know I’m in the river.”

  “We hit a capsized john boat You OK?”

  He nodded and palmed water from his eyes. “Where we at? In relation to Lindy?”

  The chart had been flung out with Harry. The rain pounded straight down now, hissing on water and swamp grass and drumming the body of our forlorn craft. I closed my eyes and tried to recall the markers. “Maybe a quarter mile. Only problem is” I looked across thirty yards of surging water “we’re on the wrong side of the river.”

  I studied the water in the fading light, the same width from bend to bend. Swim up and into the flow, I thought, fighting the current like a riptide, never stopping; swim straight across and I’d end up hundreds of yards downstream. If I wasn’t pulled under.

  “Show me how to swim,” Harry said.

  “It’s not like that, bro,” I said, watching a fifty-five-gallon drum tumble down the channel like a pop can.

  “There was this community pool when I was growing up,” he said. “They showed me how to dog-paddle. And I’ve got this” Harry pointed to the yellow vest, the brightest thing in miles, incandescent. It was probably rated for someone a hundred pounds lighter. The white straps were too short to girdle his belly; they hung at his sides in a grotesque parody of a straitjacket.

  “That ain’t dog-paddle water, Harry,” I said. “For you it’s drowning water.”

  “What the hell is it for you?”

  “Just wet, Harry. Don’t worry.”

  I tore my shirt off, the buttons landing in the water, tumbling faces drowned in an instant. The rain pelted harder. It stung my bare shoulders like rock salt dropped from a roof. I stripped to briefs, a shoulder holster with the Beretta, a belt with an extra clip and a five-inch Buck hunting knife in a leather scabbard. There was a .30 Marlin in the boat, along with a 12-gauge, but every added ounce put me closer to the bottom. I had two good legs and about one and a third arms. It had to be enough.

  The philosopher Heraclitus said you can never step into the same river twice, meaning by the time you step in a second time the water has changed. He was trumped by Parmenides who said you can never step into the same river once, it’s changing as you step. I went through a thousand rivers before I got waist deep in the warm opaque water, vortices swirling on the down-water sides of my legs. Leaves and debris clotted against me and foretold the river’s stranglehold before I’d even begun my journey.

  I looked at the far side, dark trees cutting into purple sky and all shrouded gray by the rain. I thought of Ava, in a box in the middle of nowhere with a maniac, the rain pounding his delusions deeper into his skull. I took a deep breath and dived into the current.

  It was worse than I’d imagined.

  CHAPTER 35

  He stood on the foredeck and looked across the marsh into gray light fading toward a black as lush
as velvet. No stars or moon, no lights. Sometimes he could he see lantern light from a fish camp a quarter mile downstream, but the old man who used the camp walked with a cane and listened with a hand behind his ear. A lucky old man: Had he been a threat, Mr. Cutter would have syringed a heart attack into the old man’s veins like he’d done to the grinning pervert he’d sent Caulfield. The depraved monster had approached Mr. Cutter at a bar when he was shadowing Nelson. It had been wonderful to lure him, inject him, push the simple explosive device into him with a broom handle. It was delightful what one could create with the powder from three shotgun shells, a sawed-down flashlight tube, a spark-trigger, a foot of monofilament, and a treble fishhook.

  “My fingers? Where are my fingers?”

  Willy Lindy smiled at his recollection of Caulfield’s first and last autopsy. The devious young pathologist had tried to steal Mama’s ordained job from her the one that brought her back to Willy.

  Now he was safe in his own world. Made even safer by the rain. The universe had given him his boat back, returned Mama, and now protected him from the outside world, allowing time. Time for Willy, time for Mama. Two weary travelers united in atonement, when sins of the past would be clarified through the revelation of image, redemption washing their souls in scarlet waves, leaving them safe and alone and together forever.

  He heard Mama making noises in the engine room below. She’d want to know what was going on. He’d best go and tell her.

  Show her.

  “Cars! Watch out!”

  I was halfway across, muscles screaming and burning, eyes blinded by grit and garbage, when the uprooted stump tumbled over me. It was the size of a car, its root system clutching as it rolled me under, roots like pliable iron, inescapable, like being welded to the face of a locomotive high balling beneath an ocean. I ripped and clawed at the tendrils surrounding me, pulled, tore. Screamed in my head.

  A roar of bubbles, distorted sounds. The burn of fingernails peeling away.

  The stump shuddered and spun and jammed me like a dredging shovel into the thick muck of the bottom, sponge-soft at the top, thick and sandy beneath. Mud filled my mouth and nose and ears as I waited for the crush, an orchestral roar blaring in my head. I skidded along the bottom with my final taste of life pouring from my lungs, thinking, My last moment: bubbles across my face.