Heaven's Crooked Finger

by Hank Early

  I went back over to Roger and knelt beside him.

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “Hell,” he said, “if I knew, do you really think I’d tell you?”

  “If you know, you damned well better tell me.”

  “Only thing I know is when word comes down, you got to do it. There’s problems for those that don’t.”

  “Problems?”

  He rolled over. “Yeah, problems.” He grinned. “I reckon you’ll find out soon enough.”

  I broke down his pistol, leaving the gun with him. I put the magazine in my pocket and walked around to the front of the bar.

  I figured the place would be swarming with deputies soon, so I wanted to get Mary and get the hell out. I had my hand on the front door when I heard the sirens.

  I stopped. I was a marked man. If she came with me, she’d lose her job, her income, her ability to stay with Granny, and possibly her life.

  Letting go of the door handle, I jogged away from Jessamine’s and cut across a meadow, heading for the cover of trees.

  * * *

  I walked for most of the night, originally setting a course for the old church and Rufus, but eventually I changed my mind and stayed near the highway until I came to the kudzu field and the old shack that loomed above it.

  It had been raining for the last couple of hours, and the idea of getting out of it sounded good. I made my way through the kudzu and up to the shack.

  I had my hand on the door before I noticed the light flickering within.

  Shit. I guess now was as good a time as any to figure out who I’d seen inside the shack the other day.

  I knocked on the door.

  A dog barked and voices began to whisper.

  “I just need to get in out of the rain,” I said.

  A moment later the door swung open, creaking loudly. A kid—no more than nineteen or twenty—stood there on one foot, leaning his weight against the doorframe of the tiny shack. His other foot—or maybe it was his leg—must have been injured from the way he held it just off the floor. Behind him, a mangy golden retriever poked his head out and wagged his tail amicably.

  “We don’t want no trouble,” he said. He had curly blond hair that he wore long. He was wearing a pair of sweat pants and a tank top. He was scrawny enough to make me wonder when his last meal had been.

  “Neither do I. I’d just like to get out of the rain.”

  “Who is it?” a female voice said from inside.

  The kid grimaced and hopped back a little, rebalancing his weight.

  “I don’t know. Might be one of them you saw earlier.”

  “Your leg okay?” I said. I saw now his knee was swollen something awful.

  “I’ll live.”

  “Let him in,” the girl said. “But tell him to put his hands up.”

  The kid started to repeat what she said, but I waved him off. “I heard.”

  He hopped out of the way, and I stepped inside, out of the rain. The dog licked my hand and shook his tail wildly.

  “Much obliged,” I said.

  “Hold on,” the kid said. “You got to get your hands up.”

  Not sure what was happening, I put both hands in the air and turned the corner.

  The girl was braced back in the far corner of the room, her legs shoulder width apart, her eyes hard marbles of determination, her hands gripping a shotgun that looked nearly as heavy as she was. She aimed it right at my forehead, and I knew from the way her body shook she was just frightened enough to pull the trigger.

  The boy shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Look,” I said, “why don’t you put that down? You don’t look like the kind of folks that want to hurt nobody.”

  “No, but I will,” the girl said. She was just a tiny little thing, no more than seventeen or eighteen by the look of it. Her hair was short, lopped off in a messy cut that almost looked like it had been done as a purposeful stylistic choice, but not quite.

  The boy hopped past me and settled down on the floor next to where she stood. He patted one of the girl’s painfully thin thighs. “He don’t look too bad,” he said.

  “Looks don’t mean nothing. And besides, if you’d have listened to me, he wouldn’t be here.”

  The kid shrugged. “You can’t know that.”

  “I can too. Sometimes the right thing is the wrong thing.”

  “I don’t believe that and neither do you,” he said.

  The girl just shook her head, as if she’d seen way more of the world and it’s evil ways than he had. She looked at me again, tightening her grip on the shotgun. “What’s your name?”

  “Earl,” I said.

  “You look like somebody I knew once, Earl. You from around here?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Why are you walking around in a damned rainstorm? Answer quick,” the girl said. “Don’t you dare think about lying.”

  “I knocked out a cop,” I said. “I’m in trouble.”

  “So now we’re in trouble,” the girl said. “They’ll follow you here. Shit, Todd. What are we going to do?”

  “They ain’t following me. I mean, they’re looking, but they won’t come here.” I hoped it was true.

  “See? He ain’t one of them, right?”

  “He might be. Look at him. Who does he look like to you?”

  Todd looked at me and shook his head. “So what. He’s dead anyway.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Are you talking about Brother RJ?”

  “Shit,” the girl said. “Shit. Shit. Shit. He’s one of them.” She spread out her already impossibly wide stance, as if bracing herself to fire off a shot.

  “Easy,” I said. “I’m not one of them. RJ is my father. I quit the church a long time ago.”

  The girl just stared at me.

  Todd said, “Why don’t you tell us about it?”

  “Sure. Okay. Could you just lower the shotgun first? Then I’ll be happy to.”

  “No,” the girl said. “Talk or get the hell out.”

  I nodded and told them as briefly as I could about being bitten by the snake and later leaving the church. I left out everything with Maggie. Because what was the point?

  When I finished, the girl had lowered the shotgun, though she still gripped it with both hands.

  Todd shook his head. “I’m sorry, mister. This ain’t what we’re usually like.”

  “I understand. I’m a stranger. You’ve obviously been through something.”

  And then it hit me—Mary had said the hand had been found by a kid and his dog.

  “You found the hand,” I said.

  “We don’t know nothing about no hand,” the girl said.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Really, I’m not with the police. Like I said earlier, I kicked a cop’s ass. They hate me.”

  “I’d like to believe you,” the girl said, “but I can’t let myself.”

  I nodded. “Okay. I understand that. What if I just rest a minute or two?” I started to put my hands down, but the girl grunted.

  “Up.”

  “Okay. Maybe I should just go then.”

  “I think that’s the best thing. But before you go, do you have anything to eat?”

  I looked at the girl. Her eyes told the story: they were hungry.

  “I know you understand what it means to need help,” I said. “I need some. Badly.”

  Both looked away, and I knew they felt my misery. From the looks of it, they felt it ten times over.

  I nodded at Todd’s knee. “When did it happen?”

  “This morning. I was on the way back from the payphone where I called the police about the—”

  “Shut up,” the girl said between clenched teeth.

  “Why? He knows, okay? He already knows.”

  The girl said nothing but kept her eyes—and the shotgun—trained on me.

  “Anyway, we was all set to get the hell out of this place. People around here ain’t right. This place wasn’t safe anymore after that business wi
th the hand. Was running back from the gas station about two miles down the road, trying to hurry so we could get Millie and leave, but then I tripped not ten yards from the shack. Tore it up pretty good.” He grimaced, then smiled. “I’ll be good to go in the morning though.”

  It was clear he wouldn’t be, but I decided to let it ride. “How long have you been hiding out here?”

  Todd looked at the girl. “I think we should tell him, Millie.”

  Where had I heard that name?

  “No,” she said. “You already said too much, and if you’d listened to me about just staying out of it, we could already be gone.”

  “It was the right thing to do. You of all people should want to help.”

  She took one hand off the shotgun and rubbed her face. She looked like she was about to break down.

  “Don’t worry, Todd,” I said. “I think I already know.”

  “You do?”

  I nodded. “Millie. That’s the name of the girl who disappeared with her boyfriend a while back. You went to the Holy Flame.”

  Millie finally lowered the gun.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Your daddy died, and that place went to shit.”

  “You mean . . . my brother . . . ?” I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to say.

  She shrugged. “The whole place. People say your father is still alive. Said he was displeased with the youth and wanted to straighten them out. I saw what they did to one of them. I told Todd, and he said we’d get out.”

  Todd grimaced. “Just ain’t made it very far. Yet. We was going to stay here until we could get some food for the road, but . . . that didn’t never seem to happen. We just kept eating whatever we could get our hands on.”

  “You said you saw what they did to another girl. Can you explain?”

  Millie sat down and put the shotgun across her lap. The dog wagged his tail as if relieved some of the tension had dissipated.

  “Her name was Hannah. She was so pretty, and it was almost as if that was a strike against her. After your daddy died, people said he was still alive in the mountains, and he was going to clean up the young people, get them right with God. But seemed like the only ones needed cleaning were the pretty girls. Anyway, Hannah fit that mold. One day, she just disappeared. Stopped coming to school. I asked about her, but nobody was saying nothing. I’d say she was gone a week, maybe more. When she came back, she was changed. It was awful. She’d been happy before they took her. But then she came back, and she started talking like she was one of them big believers, but it wasn’t real. She was sad.” Millie dropped her head. “I didn’t want that to happen to me.”

  “Did she say what they’d done to her or where they’d taken her?”

  Millie shook her head. “No. She wouldn’t give any details. She just said she was ‘fixed,’ but she wasn’t nowhere near fixed. She was off. Scared of her own shadow.”

  I thought of Baylee and remembered the desperation on her face when she’d asked me to help her. And so far, I’d failed her. I resolved right then to help Baylee as soon as I could.

  “I understand.” Unfortunately, I understood all too well.

  “How many years did you say you been gone?” Todd asked.

  “Thirty.”

  “And you come back because you’re trying to find this fella, and you think it might be his hand Cloverfield found?”

  “Cloverfield?”

  The boy nodded at the golden, who seemed to sense we were talking about him because he beat his tail against the dirt floor twice.

  “It’s a movie,” Millie said.

  “Oh.”

  “So why did you beat up the cop?”

  “He and another fella tried to kill me.”

  “What did the other fella look like?” Millie asked.

  “We call him Choirboy. He looks like one too, but taller than a tree and his eyes look like glass. Ain’t nothing in them but hate.”

  Millie let go of the shotgun and set it on the dirt floor.

  “I saw you the other day,” she said. “Out on the road. That cop made you lie down. Stuck his boot on your back. Was that the one you beat up?”

  I nodded. “His name is Roger. He’s one of the men that tried to kill me.”

  “You should tell him everything,” Todd said.

  “Let me think.”

  “I trust him, Millie. Besides, you got a better idea? He said he’d help us out. If we stay here for my knee to heal, it could be another couple of weeks. Somebody’s going to find out we’re here, and if it’s one of them men you saw . . .”

  “Shut up, Todd.”

  “He’s got a point,” I said. “I’m not one of them. I’m on your side.”

  Millie studied me carefully in the flickering light.

  “Okay,” she said. “But you got to promise.”

  “I promise,” I said. What I didn’t say was I planned on helping them regardless. This wasn’t any place for a couple of kids, especially two who’d run away from the Holy Flame. It was a hard place to escape.

  I knew that all too well.

  “Okay,” she said. “After they done that silly little search—which anybody could tell wasn’t no real search—I figured they’d be back. Me and Todd would have split if not for his knee, but since we had to stay, I figured I’d sit up with the gun. Just to make sure. I’m sort of protective.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Don’t be cute,” she said.

  I started to say something cute back but thought better of it. The shotgun was still within easy reach.

  “So what did you see?”

  She smiled, pleased with my compliance. “I saw them down in the kudzu, arguing. This was late, real late. There was a full moon, and I’ve got night eyes because in another life, I used to be a cat. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the ears because I couldn’t make out everything they were saying, but it sounded like one of them—the older one—was giving the younger man a really hard time about something. Then—and I couldn’t believe my eyes—I saw that they were digging. And pretty soon, they had a body, and they carried it back to their truck and drove off.”

  I needed a drink. Hell, I needed five or six.

  “Did you recognize either man?” I said.

  “Nope. I didn’t really get a good look at them. It was dark. One of the men was tall and sort of stood weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  She scratched her head. “I don’t really know. Not like a person. Too straight. Too stiff. It seemed off in a really big way.”

  “Okay.” I had to assume this was Choirboy, who seemed to be involved in doing everybody’s dirty work.

  Nope, just one man’s dirty work.

  I tried to banish the voice as quickly as it had come. But it was no use. The seed had been planted. It would be foolish to ignore it. Daddy was alive or he wasn’t. That almost seemed inconsequential in the grand scheme of things at this point. Either way, his influence was far reaching.

  Of course, there was nothing inconsequential about that question for me. For me, that question seemed to matter more than anything else in the world.

  “What about the other man, the older man?” I held my breath, waiting for her answer.

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell. He seemed older. That’s all.”

  I let out the breath. It could be Daddy. Or it could be anyone.

  “Anything else?” I asked her.

  “Are you some kind of detective?” Todd said. “I mean, it’s cool if you are. It’s just I’ve never met a detective.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m a detective. Private. Thank you for trusting me.”

  Millie nodded at the shotgun. “I’m still gonna keep it by my side.”

  Todd grinned. “She ain’t half as mean as she seems.”

  I had to admire them. They seemed happy. And that was something that was extremely elusive. They’d also managed to do what I had not. They’d escaped the Holy Flame unscathed.

  I thought that was the end of it. They both seem
ed sleepy and lay back down on the blankets after peeling one off for me. Cloverfield lay down beside them and began to lick Todd’s knee.

  I sat up, looking out the window, still wishing for a drink. I might have asked if they had anything, but they looked so content lying there, I let it ride.

  And then when the rain had fallen away to a mist and the shack was quiet and the flares of lightning seemed to be moving farther and farther away from the little shack perched adopt the field of kudzu, Todd sat up.

  “Oh, man. The map. You didn’t tell him about the map.”

  39

  “What did you say?”

  “Show him,” Todd said.

  “I was planning on keeping that for later,” Millie said, shaking her head in disgust. “Ain’t you never heard of keeping something up your sleeve? If I didn’t love you so much, Todd Bell, I’d slap you silly.”

  She sighed and reached for one of their bags. She dug inside for a moment before pulling out a piece of yellow folded paper. “I saw it fall off the body when they lifted it,” she explained.

  I moved over to the gas lamp and held the paper close as I unfolded it with shaking hands.

  It was a map, though it was a very crude one. At the top of the page, it read, The Well: best guesses. Note: not original. Below that, someone had sketched out all five of the Fingers. Three of them had stars beside them—Pointer, Ring, and Longfinger. An arrow pointed to Longfinger. Beside the arrow, someone had scribbled, Highest point. And below that was a single sentence: Lightning always strikes the highest point.

  I studied the map some more, looking for any telltale detail, no matter how small.

  I didn’t see anything. The three mountains that were starred and the notation beside Longfinger. That was all.

  I turned the paper over. On the back were some notes. It appeared to be the draft of a letter:

  Your daddy predicted they’d do this. He told me weeks ago to get in touch with you. I tried and tried, and then one day, I went back to his hiding place, and he was gone. Left me a note said he’d be at the well. He’d told me how to get there, but I can’t remember. Never been good at memorizing. I’m in a bad place. The other side has got some guesses. I’m trying to work it out, but I hear you’re a detective now. Maybe you can help. There’s Old Woman Laney, but she ain’t never liked me too much. I’ve done everything I can do. I need you here to help. I know there ain’t