by Glenn Trust
Turning west away from the dusty, old motel, Roydon faded in the car’s rearview mirror. Ahead a quiet, empty two lane highway stretched into the darkness. He followed it a few miles, able to see only a couple hundred feet in front and the shoulder of the road. The rest was black.
The dark, predawn hour suited him and his purpose. He knew he was surrounded by farmland and woods, and he knew what he was looking for. He just had to find it before the daylight exposed him. The car proceeded at a steady pace, not so slow as to attract attention or so fast that he would outdrive the visibility of the headlights…searching.
Five miles down the two lane road, he spotted a smaller country road and turned right, north. Then he saw another road, this time an unpaved dirt road leading off to the west again. He slowed to a stop, quietly opened his door, and looked around for lights or other signs of houses and people. There weren’t any.
The car turned onto the dirt road, lights off, and crept slowly for about half a mile. Pulling as far to the right as the gravel shoulder of the road would allow, he put the car in park and left the engine running. He could see little but was able to get the trunk of the car opened. He had to work for a minute to get his arms under the heavy, wrapped bundle in the trunk so that he could lift it out. Again, he looked around for signs of light or movement. He heard only the sounds of the night, insects humming, and the rustling of small animals in the brush along the road. Somewhere a rooster crowed. There were farms around. Unlike city folks, country old-timers did not burn lights at night.
The early morning predawn glow could now be seen off to the east, although he still stood in blackness on the small, dirt road. The night was waning and soon the morning light would reveal his movements and the car.
Moving more quickly now, he hefted the bundle over his shoulder and walked about ten paces into the roadside brush. Beyond that, the brush was much thicker, and it would have been difficult to push through with his load. Besides, he could hear live things scurrying in the brush near him. There was no need to take a chance and possibly step on a snake.
He let the bundle fall from his shoulder. It hit the ground with a heavy thud.
Walking quickly back to his car, he gently closed the trunk lid so that it made only a barely audible click. Pulling across the road, then reversing, and then forward again, he got the car turned around and headed back the way he had come.
Fifteen minutes later, the car was passing through Roydon. The eastern sky ahead was lit with a cherry glow. In the soft, early morning light, Roydon was almost a pretty little hamlet. Almost.
The screen door of Pete’s Place slammed as the old car passed by heading towards the interstate. Two large bikers stood outside blinking in the dim morning light after pulling an all-nighter at the bar. They talked animatedly for a few seconds, fist bumped, and climbed on their Harleys.
The gray eyes of the predator clicked up to the rearview mirror as he passed by and watched the bikers cross the road with a roar into the parking lot of the StarLite Motel. Smiling, he wondered if they wanted a room for the whole day, and if it would be the one he had occupied so recently. He was pretty sure the StarLite didn’t promise patrons clean sheets and a complimentary continental breakfast.
25. A Sense of Well-being
A quarter mile further up the dirt road from where the old car had stopped, Tom Ridley, who had lived in his small, frame house all of his life, was up for the day and had just walked outside to pee in the yard. His wife hated it when he did that, but early in the morning like this, she wasn’t up and about yet. This was his private time, and that included peeing in the yard if he wanted. That’s how they had done it when he was growing up, and it suited him fine. Besides, there was a sense of well-being and freedom, standing in the fresh morning air doing what nature called him to do with no one around.
As Tom was finishing his morning ritual, he thought he heard a small click. At first, he thought it was just the last few drops hitting the ground. A moment later though, he could clearly hear in the quiet morning air the sound of tires moving and turning and what sounded like a car backing up and then going forward, changing from drive to reverse and back to drive.
Probably Deputy Mackey sleeping out his night shift on the deserted dirt road and now heading home, he thought. He didn’t blame him much. All them sheriff’s boys had two or three part-time jobs. If they needed to catch a little shut-eye on his dirt road before going home, he was fine with that. He did the same himself sometimes out behind the chicken barns where he worked. A little nap in the middle of the workday made things seem right. They got it right down south of the border. Siesta. The older he got, the more he appreciated the concept.
Tom stretched, scratched, and pulled one strap of his overalls up over his shoulder. The night was beginning to fade. A light breeze came up, thick with the smells of the earth. He watched as the sky lightened. To the east, down the little dirt road, Tom Ridley’s road, the sun cast a reddish glow up over the horizon. The red glow lit the side of their small frame house in a way he never tired of seeing. It seemed that of all the houses in the world, the sun had chosen to spotlight his little house. The one where they had raised their boy, lived their lives, and most likely, where they would die. But not today, Tom smiled inwardly.
“Margaret, you up?” he hollered at the house.
A moment later, the rusty screen creaked and then clattered shut as his wife shuffled in her slippers onto the back porch.
“I’m up. I’m up. What you hollerin’ about.”
The plump woman in a worn robe and slippers lifted her eyes to the sunrise as she lifted a coffee cup to her lips. She smiled.
“That’s a nice one, Tom. Real nice.”
They stood quietly watching the world wake up for a few minutes.
“Here,” she said. “Come get your coffee… and have you been peeing in the yard again?”
She shook her head and went back through the screen door. Tom Ridley thumped up the old porch steps and grabbed the screen door before it closed, casting one last rearward glance down the road towards the rising sun. The rightness of the scene made him smile.
26. The Crack
The whine of the car’s tires on the asphalt forced his eyes open.
George Mackey was fatigued. The adrenaline had faded, and although Mrs. Sims’ admonition to catch the person who had murdered her husband still echoed in his ears, he found his head nodding and eyes closing as he drove. The radio chatter from the units, state and local, responding to the murder scene at the church had faded into the early morning silence so familiar on this shift.
Directed by the sheriff that he had no further duties at the crime scene, he had made a wandering patrol of the county. When he nearly put the truck into the roadside ditch, George decided it was time to head for one of his ‘cracks’, a place where others usually did not go, and a deputy could fairly safely pull over and sit undetected and watch, or doze as was the case this night. All deputies had their favorite crack. George was in his now.
It was an old rest area on a state highway. Not one of the big, fancy rest areas on the interstate, it was just a dirt pull off from the two lane highway with a couple of picnic tables surrounded by large trees. The state maintained it, such as it was, because it was on a stretch of state highway that crossed southern Georgia from east to west, skirting the Okeefenokee Swamp.
Backing his vehicle as far as possible to the rear of the rest area, George stopped in the trees and brush, and cut the engine. The brown sheriff’s pickup was invisible in the dark and shadows.
Rolling the window down, he gave a knob on the radio a quick twist to turn the volume up and pulled his jacket tight around him. A minute later, his eyes had fluttered closed.
A few minutes passed before the tire and engine sounds of the approaching car had roused him. The noise increased in pitch as the car approached. George sat motionless, head back against the headrest, bundled in his jacket, arms folded across his chest. His eyes were slit open and
peering over the steering wheel as the car passed, the Doppler effect causing the engine noise to decrease in pitch as it moved away from the deputy’s position. It was an older model car, maybe a Chevrolet or Pontiac or some other GM model. Color was uncertain, maybe gray or faded brown. Very plain looking.
It was a little early for normal traffic to be out, but not unheard of. Probably a car traveling from the west across the state, headed to one of the coastal towns or barrier islands. George was not aware that the car had already passed this way heading west, not more than fifteen minutes before George had pulled into the rest area.
No big deal anyway, farmers around here all drove old cars. Normally, they rose and slept with the sun. While this was a bit early for them to be out, sometimes the old ones couldn’t sleep like normal people and would be up and fidgety at ungodly hours for no apparent reason, checking on livestock or a vegetable garden or the chicken barns or some such farm stuff. They couldn’t wait until daylight. They were up and bound to be stirring about. It was just their nature. He knew it because he had come up on a farm not far from here, and he had made up his mind not to live that life. George Mackey shifted in his seat a bit, pulled his jacket tighter around his neck and waited for daybreak so that he could call the dispatcher and tell her he was going off duty. His small, empty apartment and bed awaited.
The old car’s taillights faded out of sight. Dumb farmer, he thought.
27. Lylee
Leyland Torkman, he actually went by the nickname Lylee, was completely unaware of Tom’s morning ritual or George’s secret napping spot. Having retraced his route in the old Chevy back to the StarLite Motel and onto I-95, he relaxed a bit and scanned the interstate for danger and opportunities.
The sobriquet of Lylee was one used by those who knew him, not because they were friends and on intimate terms. It would have been hard, maybe impossible, to find someone who actually called him ‘friend’. But people who knew him just learned to call him by the name his mother had used when he was a child because it was the name he used for himself, although not through any attachment to his mother. He liked the innocent, childlike sound of it. It suited his purpose. Another form of camouflage. Others might have snickered at the childish name, but that was between them, and not within the hearing of Leyland Torkman.
The nickname from his mother had come perhaps because she thought it a cute name for her cute little boy. She had told him in his younger years that ‘Lylee’ was how he had pronounced his own name as a toddler, and so she had started calling him that. It was hard to believe that there had ever been any motherly affection in the life of this quiet, sullen man but, in fact, he had had a mother who thought he was the center of the universe. While they had lived on the edge of poverty, she had worked hard to make sure he had the nice things that other children had.
That was a bone of contention between his mother and father, a man who worked at menial jobs trying to support his family and who felt that they shouldn’t put on airs to be like others. The dead end work and endless poverty had led his father to drink, and eventually an early grave. The departure of his father from their life was hardly felt by Lylee. His mother had kept him isolated from the only man who could have been a part of his life. He belonged to her and no one else. He was her little Lylee.
The pride of fatherhood had brought them together as a family, at first. Although Lylee had no memory of it and his mother would never have shared it with him, Bud Torkman had been as devoted to his son as the boy’s mother was. But tension had grown between them as it became clear that she considered Lylee hers, not their son…hers. Eventually, the tension with his wife and the burden of barely being able to provide for his family had worn him down. The alcohol and the emotional distance he put between himself and wife and child were a barrier. It kept them out and him in. In the end, the old man just came and went to work and barely spoke to his son or acknowledged his existence.
The loss of his father was not tragic. In fact, it didn’t register at all to Lylee. The event had no significance and meant nothing to him. The boy continued in school as an average student. He had no extracurricular school activities, but did have an after school job at an early age. He was considered a good worker by a succession of employers, but none ever asked him to stay when he left. An air of inapproachability surrounded the young man. He moved through the world invisibly.
The only relationship in Lylee’s life was with his mother, who became increasingly possessive with age and the bareness of her own life. Relationship was, in reality, a stretch in describing the interaction between mother and son. She doted on him and demanded a level of affection in return that he was not able to provide, nor inclined to return. For his part, he tolerated the woman who had given him birth, but just barely. Eventually, he left for good. Some said that it was his mother’s possessive clinging that had driven him away. Most people just knew that Lylee was destined to leave, and if he never came back, so much the better. He was a creepy kid anyway.
It was, perhaps, self-preservation and not an actual awareness that pushed him finally out of the front door and as far away from his mother’s presence as he could get. The solitary young man put himself through technical school, studying computer programming. It was a vocation ideally suited to him, requiring minimal interaction with other persons, and then only about the technical aspects of programming. Hovering over a keyboard inputting code, required no unwanted interaction or office bullshitting with co-workers. As long as he did his job, his employer was happy. The fact that he was an almost anonymous employee to even his closest supervisor was actually a benefit from a management perspective. He required little of their management time, never complained, and worked well without requiring much supervision. They cared not at all about his activities outside of work.
Visits to his mother became exceedingly rare, and when he did visit, there was nothing to say. She chattered as always about her little Lylee who had come to visit. It was a fantasy. He knew that he had never been the cute, bubbly boy she babbled on about, and they had never been the happy family she portrayed them to be in her rambling monologues while he sat with a glass of cold lemonade dripping in the humid air over his fingers and onto his lap. He made the visits because it seemed that was what he was expected to do, although not sure who it was that expected it of him or why he cared.
And that thought became the moment of awakening for him. Why should he care? He didn’t care. Somewhere deep in his psyche, awareness grew that he need only do what he wanted. It was a liberating concept for Lylee, and eventually the visits home ended. He was liberated by the isolation in his life and separation from the shreds of family memory that only barely existed at best. It was freedom to him, and the power he felt within grew as his separation and distance from the rest of the world increased.
At the age of fifty-six, his mother followed her husband to an early grave, probably feeling much the same isolation and desperation he had felt. The loss of her Lylee had been too much. She died alone and unremembered by her only son, her Lylee.
Now, he lived invisibly and alone. His isolation brought him security and freedom from the world, and with that freedom, came great power. And the power brought him…everything.
Invisible and solitary, it grew within, the power. It raged and roared to be unleashed. And then one day, he opened the door.
Instinctively, he became the hunter. The truth is that his family life probably had little causative effect on what he had become. It was coded deep in his genes. The sad and pathetic childhood he had endured, the absence of a strong fatherly influence, and the cloying possessive nature of the relationship with his mother only made it easier to transform into his true nature. It would have happened, sooner or later.
With the transformation, the world jumped into focus for him. A different light shone around him. Invisible to others, it illuminated the world around him differently than the normal light that others used to discern their surroundings. Becoming the predator, his view o
f his surroundings and perception of others evolved into something not human. He learned the techniques of preying on the weak and the unaware. His runarounds were training exercises that honed his predatory skills. His power increased with each hunt.
The pain he inflicted on his victims was important only because it brought him greater power. He felt no more for them than a coyote does for the jackrabbit in its jaws. A true sociopath, it was right because it was good for him. That was enough.
28. Too Complicated
George Mackey dropped his Sam Brown belt with its gear on the weathered boards and plopped his ass down into a porch chair. Flipping up the lid of the scuffed and ever-present cooler, he grabbed a beer, popped the seal on the can, and held it to his lips for a long pull with his head tilted back.
“Little early, ain’t it?” The old man came walking around the side of the house and slowly took the three steps up to the porch, holding the handrail. The morning was turning hot, and on reaching the porch, he stopped and wiped the inside of his hat with a dirty handkerchief, then set the straw, wide brimmed hat back on his head.
“Had a long night,” George replied taking another sip from the can.
The old man nodded and eased himself slowly into the other porch chair. They were really kitchen chairs that had become porch chairs when they had been dragged outside sometime in the past, long before George had taken up residence at Fel Tobin’s place.
