by Glenn Trust
Okay, so much for his adventure. Time to get back to his porch and his chair. Turning, he circled around to the rear of the church and the path leading through the woods to the old house.
Stopping at the edge of the woods, the old man scanned the building and lot one more time. The air was becoming thicker and damper as the night came on. A mist began to rise from the ground enveloping the base of the church, like something from a spook movie, he thought. An involuntary shiver crawled up his back.
Silly old fool, his wife would say, and she would be right, he thought. Enough. Definitely time to get back to the front porch. He turned and clicked the flashlight on as he swung around and started to step gingerly back into the trees. The dim, yellow beam of light reflected off something about a hundred feet away, and he stopped in his tracks.
Squinting, he could make out that it was a car backed up against the woods, almost hidden by them at the back edge of the lot. It looked like an older car and dull in the beam of the flashlight…the type of car someone from around here would drive.
Peering intently at the ground for snakes, alert to anything that slithered, the old man thought for a moment about going back into the woods and the comfort of his porch chair. An old car left in a parking lot in these parts wasn’t all that unusual. In fact, it was pretty common. Probably one of the church goers broke down on Sunday…or maybe some kids laid down in the seat waiting for him to leave so they could get back to doing what kids did in the backseat of cars. That thought tweaked his curiosity.
He stepped back onto the gravel and walked along the edge of the woods towards the car. The shadows of the trees made the corner of the lot where the car sat much darker so that he hadn’t noticed it as he walked from the woods. He had been focused on the church building. He still wouldn’t have noticed it if the flashlight hadn’t reflected dimly off the car’s glass.
14. Ambush
Somewhere a door banged shut. It was a muffled sound and seemed a long ways off. Swiveling his head, the gray eyes scanned methodically in all directions. No light. No movement. But the sound had been unmistakable.
Roughly but silently, he pulled the cut clothing up around her waist and pushed the terrified girl into the car, binding her once again to the seat frame. His fingers left purple bruises on her arms. Putting his finger to his lips, he leaned close.
“No sound,” he whispered. “No movement.”
He stared at her with his eyebrows raised expectantly until she nodded her understanding.
Soundlessly, he moved into the woods.
The dim shaft of light emerged from the trees. The shuffling gait of the person holding it caused it to waver, swinging widely back and forth, as if searching for danger, but not truly expecting any.
The faint beam detected no trace of the man in the woods. He was invisible to the person holding the flashlight, and would have been difficult to see, even in broad daylight.
He watched as the yellowish beam made its way around the church. The person holding it shuffled to the woods, and for a moment, it seemed it would disappear into the dark trees. But then it hesitated and swung in the direction of the car. After a few seconds, the light bounced slowly up and down moving deliberately towards the old car.
He avoided looking directly looking into the beam allowing his night vision to give him a picture of the intruder. The silhouette and shuffling gait were that of an old man. Inside his chest, his heart raced with anticipation…excited. Outside there was only deadly silence.
Approaching closer, the old man shined the light through the windshield. There was nothing visible. Stepping up to the old car, he bent over with the light to peer inside.
Reckon what the car’s problem is, he thought, unconcerned. The danger so close raised no hackles on is neck, no psychic warning, or premonition from the Almighty. It was just an old, empty car in a parking lot.
A startled breath escaped him, and he almost jumped back.
The girl, bent over sideways so that her head was below the window, had her hands tied and bound with something he could not make out. There was duct tape around her mouth. It was like something from a movie, and in the few seconds it had taken to approach the car and see what was inside, the old man really and truly wished he had let the old woman call the sheriff. He very much wanted to be on the porch of his house waiting for a deputy to come shine his lights around and make things right with the bright spotlights and not this dim little flashlight. What had he gotten into? It was less than a second before he discovered the answer.
He raised the light slightly, and the girl’s eyes widened. It wasn’t the light that seemed to frighten her. The eyes were focused on something…behind him.
Instinctively the hand not holding the flashlight started to move backwards towards the pistol in his pocket. It was too late.
Searing pain burned through his right kidney. Piercing the old man’s body to the hilt, the knife’s eight-inch blade penetrated completely through his thin frame, nearly protruding from his abdomen.
With his arm around the old man’s neck and mouth, he worked the blade back and forth, in and out. The frail old body quivered at the pain and the shock of the knife’s movements through his flesh and organs. A high-pitched wheezing sound escaped from his lungs, followed by a gurgling, rattling noise from his throat.
The attack was too sudden for him to struggle, and the placement of the blade was expert enough to be a death blow. It was not a quick merciful death, but death nonetheless.
After a minute, the quivering and feeble struggle ended. The old man’s body crumpled to the gravel. Blood oozing from the wound thickened in the sand and gravel.
The attacker stepped back and examined his work. Unexpected, he thought…unexpected, but not unpleasant. It was a bonus, and he smiled at that.
He retrieved the small pistol from the old man’s back pocket. He had felt it as he leaned closely, almost intimately, into him during the attack.
The girl looking up from the seat of the car could see him, although she could no longer see the old man who had peered into the car a few moments ago. Their eyes met, and the terror reflected back at him from the girl brought another surge of fulfillment to him.
Tears fell from her eyes but did not touch her cheek. They dripped, slowly at first, and then more rapidly across the duct tape covering her mouth and face until they plopped onto the car’s seat. It excited him.
She was helpless. The only thing she could produce now was tears, and she was denied the sensation of feeling them drop across her face…the wet, weeping release of crying. They rolled from her eyes to the duct tape to the seat, never touching her skin. She cried them but never felt her own tears. It was an exquisite torture and it made him more powerful.
Opening the car door, he plopped loosely into the driver’s seat and let the door slam shut. The engine started smoothly, and he pulled slowly around the church with the headlights off. Stopping by the road for a moment, he made sure there was no car approaching from either direction and then pulled onto the black two lane, headed for the interstate.
*******
The old woman on the porch lifted her head. The sound of the closing car door came muffled, but discernible through the hundred yards of black woods.
“Harry? That you?” She knew her frail voice would not carry through the trees.
Silently, hands folded in her lap she waited, peering into the dark woods at the edge of the lot of the home she had shared with her husband for sixty years. He would be back soon. The old fool, she thought.
*******
She was bound again to the seat frame. Her eyes had the look. He had seen it many times before. The look pleaded with him to drop her off now, as he had promised. It was pathetic and stupid.
She had just witnessed the murder of the old man, someone who might have been able to help her. Could she truly believe that he would keep his word and release her? He wondered at it.
The need to survive, the longing desire for her life not
to end, overpowered her reason. It made her hope for the absurd…her personal survival. Somewhere inside, the synapses of her brain fired electric impulses that shut down reason. The hope for…need for…life became her reality.
Pathetic and stupid…and it thrilled him…the terrified, begging look in her eyes. He had seen that look before in his victims’ eyes.
It was the same look he had observed once, watching a documentary show on African wildlife. The gazelle, hanging from a leopard’s jaws, stunned and crazed with fear, eyes wide open, had that same pleading look. The animal was still alive, legs trying to run, twitching in the cat’s mouth. Not dead…yet.
*******
In a supermarket parking lot, some miles away across the Florida state line, ice cream melted in a plastic bag on the seat of a small Japanese car.
15. Backup
A tunnel of dark green embraced the truck. The headlights cast a long beam of light down the passageway of trees so that leaves and grass swirled in kaleidoscope patterns where the light illuminated. Beyond the shoulders of the road, little could be seen The heavy, humid aromas of the vegetation blew rushing through the interior. He savored the smell, rich and pungent.
He loved this time of night. Mist rose from the creeks and depressions in the ground. Unseen life moved, chirped, and scurried everywhere. It could be heard even through the rushing noise of the pickup.
George turned his head and spat a stream of tobacco juice, some of which actually made it beyond the door of the truck to hit the road with a splat. Squatting on the centerline, a lizard dodged the brown liquid as the pickup rushed by with a muffled roar. Undeterred, the small green reptile darted to the shoulder and the safety of the brush.
The radio crackled and spoke in a tinny female voice.
“302. Meet a woman at 715 Power Line Road in reference to a missing person, her husband. Subject is a black male, five feet, eight inches, thin build, seventy-nine years of age.”
“10-4 Dispatch,” another tinny voice, this one male, responded.
Located in southeastern Georgia, the I-95 corridor cut across the eastern edge of Pickham County. Most of the businesses and developed areas were along the interstate’s path. The remainder of the county was primarily agricultural. Farms and small settlements dotted the landscape, with the occasional country store or tractor supply business located at a crossroad to provide service to the locals.
During the day and evening shifts at the sheriff’s department there were three or four units working the county. Those on the day shift were numbered 101 through 104. Evening shift units were 201 through 204, and so on. On third shift, George’s shift, they called it morning watch; there were never more than two units working, and some nights, only one.
Morning watch deputies had to possess a high degree of self-reliance. Backup could be a long ways off, as much as an hour away. It depended on what the Georgia State Patrol troopers were doing, what section of the interstate they were working, and which truck stop diner they had gathered at for their coffee and breakfast.
The gathering was a ritual that took place at precisely two a.m. every morning. George reckoned that between two and three in the morning you could run a NASCAR race up the interstate through Pickham County. All the troopers from the surrounding fifty miles were gathered somewhere for pancakes.
Before his divorce, George had thought about taking the exam and moving to the Patrol. Thinking was all he had done though. Darlene had wanted him to make the change. The pay was better.
After a while, Darlene had tired of waiting for her husband to move his career ahead, although she had never considered policing much of a career anywhere, including the Patrol. Still, it was a step up from Pickham County, and she expected her husband to be as upwardly mobile as he could be…given his limitations.
George told her he was waiting for the right time to make the change. He told himself that he preferred doing something besides traffic enforcement and drug interdiction stops on the interstate.
In reality, it boiled down to the fact the he was home. He loved what he did and really did not want to be anywhere else.
It wasn’t until Darlene left with the girls that he realized he had waited too long. He told her he would apply for the Patrol if she would stay. She told him he was too late. He was always too late.
“Dispatch, 301, I’ll be enroute to back 302.” George put the microphone back in its cradle.
“Ten-four, 301,” the dispatcher responded pleasantly. George could hear the chatter of other operators talking in the background at the central dispatch center that was funded by various counties and public safety units in this part of rural Georgia. The cheerful background conversations indicated that not much was happening in the law enforcement world of south Georgia that night.
He guided his pickup to an intersection and turned right. It was a ten mile ride to Power Line Road. There was no hurry. Missing persons did not constitute emergency calls.
The hum of the car’s tires increased in volume as he increased speed. The buzzing of the night creatures a few feet away in the brush along the road diminished as the noise of the pickup increased.
An old car moved smoothly through the night in the opposite direction. No police officer would find any reason to stop him, especially not the one that passed him moving southbound well above the speed limit. The driver with the girl bound beside him, made his way to the interstate and turned onto the northbound entrance ramp, disappearing into the stream of red taillights.
16. Goddammit
Goddammit. The grizzled, old farmer waved a bony hand at her as the girl climbed down out of the aging Ford pickup. There was a deep look of concern in his eyes. Goddammit, he thought again.
“Girl, you be careful now,” he said out the window. The old man had girls too, and he could see that this one was mistreated. Someone had done bad things to her.
He was a simple man and wanted to help. All he could think to do was to give her a ride away from the trouble. Damn, he had trouble enough of his own.
Still, he wanted nothing worse to happen to her, and he knew that plenty worse could happen. He didn’t want to think too much about that.
“I mean it, girl. You be careful…especially about men and such.”
“Yes, sir, I will,” she said softly, and smiled back at him. Her words sounded tired as if there wasn’t anything this old farmer could tell her about men or trouble or how they could combine together to create misery.
“Thanks for the ride.”
She walked slowly away from the truck into the I-95 Diner, located coincidentally, at the entrance ramp to I-95. The old farmer watched her in the mirror.
Goddammit, he thought again, reaching the limits of his ability to articulate his concern for the girl and his guilt at leaving her at the diner in the middle of the night. Shaking his head, he moved slowly out of the parking lot.
The load of tomatoes in the truck bed had to be to market in the morning. The truck engine was missing on two cylinders, and the transmission missed a gear as he accelerated onto the interstate. The girl faded in the mirror, and his mind moved back to his own problems, coaxing the old truck down the highway.
Lyn turned towards the diner. The trip from Judges Creek, Georgia, her home up to this night, had only taken a couple of hours, most of that walking until she had hitched the ride with the old man. It seemed like much longer, and her body was bone tired.
A large moth flopped loudly against the lighted I-95 Diner window. It beat itself over and over against the window as she watched. A shiver crawled up her back.
It wasn’t’ that she was afraid of bugs. The moth was helpless and hopeless. It would never reach the light. The futility of its efforts made her shudder. Endlessly, flopping and beating its powdery wings against the glass until it died.
She walked through the door and was assaulted by the odors of coffee and steak and eggs, thick in the close air. She touched the two hundred and fifty-two dollars in her pocket. Her mother had s
hoved two hundred of it into her hand as she shoved Lyn out of the door. It had taken Lyn six months to save the balance.
She considered spending some of it on a meal, then thought better of it. Her journey had only begun. Hungry as she was, the money had to get her a long way. She would eat only when it was absolutely necessary.
She could go a long time without food. Been doing it most of her life as her slight frame and hollow cheeks bore testimony.
She had always been thought of by the local boys as a pretty girl, but they had nothing to compare her with except the other local girls, all from families that struggled to get by. She had taken their advances as nothing more than boys on the rut, aching to plant their thing somewhere. After a few beers on a Friday night, they weren’t all that particular.
There were times when feeling the heat herself, she would go with one of them. But she saved it mostly. Making those few times as special as they could be in the bed of some beat up truck. She didn’t blame the boys for being on the prowl for tail.
What else was there to do? It passed the time, and for a few moments, it could even make you feel that there was more. It could make you feel that you and this young, hard-bodied boy could make a life far away from the pain.
But then she knew that it could never be that way with any of the local boys. They were all like their daddies. They had all been born in Pickham County, and they would all die in Pickham County. They couldn’t see beyond it, or didn’t want to. Maybe they didn’t need to. Maybe they were happy.
She guessed they were. Why not? Poor as they were, they did not live in homes with fathers who hated them.
Still, she knew they thought she was pretty, and she knew how to be sweet. She was going to let that take her as far as it could.
A plump woman in an apron behind the counter smiled at her. Her long, graying hair was pulled up, and there were little beads of sweat along her hairline attesting to the closeness of the night, even inside the air-conditioned building.
