by Glenn Trust
On the other side of the state, in the old farmhouse Sharon lay on her back also, alone in the dark, listening to the crickets hum outside. She thought of George, much as he thought of her, remembering everything about him, afraid that somehow she would forget something about him.
That is how it was. In the dark, thinking and clinging to each other in their thoughts, they were not quite so alone.
The End
Redemption
Glenn Trust
The Hunters Series
Book 5
Dedication
For the lost souls among us.
Part One: Purgatory
Abandon all hope, you who enter here.
~Dante Alighieri~
The Inferno
______________________________________
Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to.
One is always alone.
~T.S. Eliot~
1. A Lesson
1972 in the backwoods of South Georgia…
“Again.”
The boy turned his head to look at his father, the question plain on his face. He wanted confirmation that he had permission to continue.
His father nodded. “Hit him again.”
Albert Stinson grinned and pulled his arm back. Even at fifteen years of age, his fist was meaty, thick, his arms muscular, almost a man. He let fly with a right hook. The boy prostrate on the ground under him squirmed, trying to avoid the blow, but Albert’s knuckles caught him on the bridge of the nose. The grinding crunch was audible above the boy’s screams for help.
He twisted to escape the next blow. Albert turned to look at his father.
“Enough.” He looked at his second son, Carl. “Your turn. Get in there boy.”
Clyde Stinson watched his sons, leaning casually back against a tree. He pulled the used wad of tobacco from his cheek raking it out with his forefinger. Dropping it to the ground, he took the foil envelope from his back pocket and began stuffing more in his mouth, pushing it down with his finger, deep between his cheek and gums.
Albert held the boy on the ground while his brother Carl seated himself on their adversary’s chest. Carl turned and looked up at his father, adjusting the tobacco in his mouth.
Clyde Stinson’s eyes narrowed and he took his big finger from his cheek, wet with brown tobacco juice. “What the hell you waitin’ for boy? I told you.” He nodded at the bloodied face under Carl. “Get at it…now.”
Carl lifted a fist, not as big as Albert’s, but big enough to do damage. He let it fly into the side of the boy’s face. The pain-filled shriek reverberated through the woods. Two crows lifted from a pine tree, cawing and squawking at having their afternoon sunning interrupted.
The beating went on for several more minutes. When the boy on the ground tried to raise his arms to defend himself, Albert pinned them down under his knees while Carl rained blows down into his face until he was out of breath from the exertion.
“All right. That’ll do.”
“Yes, sir.” Carl stood up, rubbing the sore out of his knuckles, skinned and grazed from the impacts with the boy’s teeth.
“You’re next, Bain.” Clyde looked at his youngest son. “Get to it.”
Ten-year-old, Bain Stinson, stood, hands in his pockets avoiding the mangled face of the boy, staring at the ground.
“You hear me, boy? Get in there. Take your turn.”
“Yes, sir. I hear you.”
“You best move then and get to it.”
Bain looked up at his father, tears in his eyes. “I don’t wanna hit him.”
“What you mean you don’t wanna hit him?”
Bain shrugged and looked at the ground again. “I just don’t want to.”
“Jesus Christ!” Albert stood up. “You heard Daddy. Get to it Bain, or I’ll whip your ass for you myself.”
“Shut up, Albert,” Clyde Stinson warned his oldest boy.
“Yes, sir.”
Still leaning against the tree, chewing the wad of tobacco down into a wet round pulp, calm, like he was at a Sunday church picnic, Clyde looked at Bain. “You tell me, boy. That one there.” He jerked his head at the mangled face of the youth on the ground. His shrieks had faded to sobbing whimpers while the discussion about his fate went on above. “He the boy that went after you? Gave you that fat lip?”
“Yes, sir.” Bain’s eyes never lifted above his father’s shoes. He shrugged. “Lip’s okay. No big deal.”
“The hell you say. He went after a Stinson…that’s you…a Stinson. We don’t allow no one goin’ after one of ours.”
“But it wasn’t nothin’. Didn’t mean nothin’.”
“Means somethin’ now, I’d say.” Clyde Stinson stood up straight from the tree, took a step towards his son and stood towering over him until the boy looked up. He spoke through clenched teeth. “Your brothers found him…drug him out here in the woods…took their turns settlin’ things up. It’s your turn now.”
Bain looked at Sonny Gilbert, still pinned to the ground by Carl. His battered face, lumpy with bruises, streaked with blood and tears no longer resembled the boy who had thrown a punch at school and knocked him down. Bain had told him in front of a crowd of other fifth and sixth graders that he threw like a girl.
“Really, Daddy…I don’t want to hit him no more. He been hit enough.”
Clyde’s beefy, rough hand came up like lightning, cuffing his son in the side of the head with enough force to cause him to stagger and fall back to the ground. He pointed down at his son with a big forefinger.
“You gonna bloody your hands, just like your brothers. This is Stinson business. He started it when he gave you that lip. Stinsons are gonna finish it. It’s a lesson you’ll learn, by God.” He reached down and jerked Bain to his feet. “Now get to it! Or goddamn if I won’t beat you within an inch of your life, myself.”
Sonny Gilbert’s head moved side to side in the dirt, pleading for mercy. There was no mercy to be had.
Bain straddled the boy who had been a friend up until that day. The memory of the schoolyard fight would have faded and he and Sonny would have ended up friends again, sooner or later.
But Albert and Carl had heard about the fight…had rounded up Sonny when he was alone…taken him to the woods where Clyde was waiting. The lesson had begun. They would be there until Bain did what he was told and ended it.
He landed a less than earnest blow on Sonny’s shoulder. Sonny moaned, but it was mostly, reflexive by now. Bain’s desultory punch had done no damage.
“Goddamnit! You put your back into it boy!” Clyde leaned over shouting into his son’s ear.
Bain hit Sonny again, harder, in the mouth. Then again…and again…sobbing with each blow.
When his knuckles were sufficiently bloody, Clyde ended the lesson. “Stand up.”
Bain stood facing his father.
“Look at me, boy.”
Eyes rising slowly from one button on the stained work shirt to the next, Bain finally met his father’s stare.
“I don’t want you forgetting this lesson, boy. No one goes after a Stinson. Family…blood…that’s all that matters in this world.” Clyde’s hand came up in a fist this time, crashing into Bain’s face so that he fell to the ground, his nose bloodied. He leaned over his son. “Nothin’ gets between us… not money…not friends…not women …nothin’! Someone hurts a Stinson…you hurt ‘em back. You understand me, boy?”
“Yes sir,” Bain said nodding, pinching his nose to stop the bleeding.
Clyde stepped over to Sonny Gilbert. He sent a stream of spit and tobacco juice to the ground beside his head close enough to spatter his cheek. “You here, what I told my boy?”
Sonny nodded and said, “Yes sir,” his voice a croaking whisper.
“No one hurts a Stinson…gets between us…you do, you pay the price. You come after one, you come after all. You understand?”
Sonny Gilbe
rt blinked and the tears in his eyes rolled in streaks down his cheeks. He nodded.
“Say it.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
“You best…next time won’t be so easy on you.” He looked out at the surrounding forest. “These woods back up to the swamp. We need to do this again and we might just drag you out there and sink you in the black water for the gators to eat.”
Clyde looked at his sons. “Let’s go.”
They filed down the path behind their father Albert the oldest, followed by Carl, then Bain. Sonny Gilbert lay on his back staring up through the pines, touching his face now and again, and then pulling his hand away in pain. He would stay there until he was sure Clyde Stinson and his clan had departed the woods.
2. Prison
With one hand, he slid his thumb under the aluminum ring of the can and popped it up. He had become practiced in opening his beers one-handed. It was an achievement that had taken little effort. He had already been competent and experienced in the basic operation of pop-top cans.
The ability to lift the tab with the thumb of the hand holding the can was just a matter of practice, and he had lots of time to practice. His next goal was to become ambidextrous in the maneuver, opening the cans with either hand at will. He had full confidence that he would achieve his goal.
Seated on an aluminum lawn chair, beside an old workbench, roughhewn from heavy planks that smelled of old motor oil, he lifted the can to his mouth, his eyes roaming the barn’s interior. Pale yellow sunlight filtered through a dusty, flyspecked window on the east side. The window on the west remained in the deep shade of the early morning.
He sat in a corner, in the dark, sipping the beer, contemplating his surroundings, his world, the place where he went to forget. He’d been going there every day for months now.
Forgetting was not easy, he had learned...was learning…but he was dedicated to the task. He would figure how to do it…forget. Until then there was beer. He took another long sip of the first one of the day.
From a rafter near the door, a brown recluse spider, slid smoothly, silently down on its thread of spun gossamer silk and began examining its web in a corner near the floor. It moved delicately from strand to strand, sometimes appearing to pluck at it as if playing an instrument. He watched the spider working over its web as he sipped his beer.
The web was laid out in a random, haphazard way. It was not intended to catch prey. It was a nest. He knew that the spider was a hunter, not waiting for its victims to become ensnared in the sticky, silk web. It had been prowling the rafters in search of some tasty moth or beetle. Now, it was coming back to the nest where it would rest, digest and hole up during the daylight hours.
When he first noticed the spider a few months earlier, the thought occurred to him that he should knock down the nest and destroy it. Brown recluses are poisonous, even deadly sometimes. He didn’t knock it down.
Instead, he had watched it, studied it, drinking his beer and contemplating the little hunter’s world. He had become intimately familiar with the spider, its comings, its goings, its diet, its mating.
After the first day, he thought there was no reason to kill the spider. He didn’t seem interested at all in the man sitting on the worn chair by the workbench. Watching it was a diversion, something to do, to think about besides everything he was trying to forget.
He tossed the third can of the day five feet through the air to the rusted fifty-gallon drum sitting at the other end of the workbench. It clanked against the side and rattled to the bottom with the other cans. He’d have to empty it one day, he thought…one day, but not today.
Stretching back in the flimsy aluminum chair, he adjusted his ass on the frayed webbing to a more comfortable position. He was feeling more at home there, in the barn, beside the workbench sitting in the dark corner, on the chair with his beer. It hadn’t been that way at first.
George Mackey had come home, to the old house in the country, to Sharon Price, six months earlier. After serving his eighteen months in prison, life had begun again…except there was no life. There was only sitting alone each day with the beer, searching for something to do, some purpose to validate his continued use of oxygen and consumption of food and drink.
His sentence for violating the public trust while a deputy with the Pickham County Sheriff’s Department and serving on a task force hunting a serial killer, was a slap on the wrist. George knew it…Sharon knew it…hell, everyone knew it.
He had killed the man they were hunting…had ended the string of murders. George had not allowed the killer to escape…or go to prison for his crimes, sent there by a jury of his peers. George Mackey simply looked him in the eye, saw the killer animal inside, and pulled the trigger on his pistol.
He should have been thankful for the light sentence. The jury could have found him guilty of murder. The judge could have sentenced him to life in prison. That was what the Georgia Attorney General had wanted.
Instead, his lawyer had made a masterful argument and provided a brilliant defense. Probably, the most brilliant thing he did was get out of the way the day George testified in his own behalf.
The jury heard it all. George looked them in the eye and bared his soul, explained how he had stared down at the killer and shot him…no discussion…no attempt to take him into custody…no last words. Just George deciding it was time to end it, and knowing how to do that. The memory of the Glock bucking sharply in his hand, the roars of the gunshots fading into the trees was as vivid as if it had happened yesterday, instead of four years earlier.
The jury heard it all…and found him guilty of violating the public trust, a relatively minor felony in comparison with capital murder. He should be thankful, he thought a hundred times a day.
But George Mackey had merely swapped the Jackson State Correctional Facility for the barn. He spent his days there, confined in his self-made prison, knowing he should be thankful but not sure for what.
He had found his true calling in life years earlier. It was a fortunate thing, knowing what it was that you were good at, and doing it. It had been a blessing to him…had helped him forget the failures…focus on what he was good at and put aside the guilt.
It was gone now…his work…the focus and purpose. Flooding back to fill the vacuum, the failures and guilt crowded their way into his thoughts, eating away at his conscience.
He would never be a deputy again, the court conviction had seen to that. In a dark place in his heart, he thought that the jury should have found him guilty on all counts and thrown the book at him. He could have dealt with that, accepting the punishment for his crime. That would have become his purpose.
The jury had not done that…put the bullet in him that would have put him out of his misery. The judge had been lenient and George Mackey was left to consider his life…what had come before and what would be in the future. Both were hollow, empty caverns.
There had been times when he had faced the darkness inside human nature, had accepted it head on, grappled with it, and hunted it down. He knew now that confronting the evil in others had been the easier task.
Facing the darkness in yourself was infinitely more difficult. It frightened him. Lost in the tangle of failures, he was fearful in ways that he had never imagined and could not now understand. Not understanding terrified him the most.
Sharon. He loved her more than he had words to describe, but words seemed empty now, meaningless. He would gladly have given up his own life for her, and the thought preyed on his mind that perhaps he should have given it up.
She had committed to him. Now, she was trapped. He was a different person. He would never again be the man she had known and loved. Yet, she stayed.
There were others.
His daughters. His ex-wife had taken them from him, but that wasn’t her fault. Life with a small-time deputy in a hick county had not been what she needed, or what he had promised.
The penalty was the loss of his daughters. With each passing year, they grew
more distant. They had hardly known him for years. Now, they knew him not at all. He was a stranger.
Friends. Death and suffering, permanent disfigurement had come to those he loved and cared about. He had failed them…had not been there when they needed him…and they had paid the price.
The Victims. More death, more suffering because he had been late…inadequate…unable to protect them.
Yes, he was feeling more at home, in his prison in the barn. He did the time there that the court and jury had denied him.
It had become apparent to him, as he sat in the barn sipping his beer, that punishment did not require a jury, judge or steel bars. There was always guilt. Knowing guilt did not require a verdict from a jury.
He lifted a can with one hand, his left this time, and popped it open with his thumb, watching the spider nestle down in its web for a day’s rest.
3. Boiling Point
“Well, lookit there.” Albert Stinson looked out across the knee-high weeds and grass surrounding the dilapidated trailer they called home and pointed the brown longneck bottle at the pickup passing on the road. “That who I think it is?”
“I’ll be damned.” Younger brother Bain grinned and nodded. “Yep, that’s him.” He looked at the middle brother Carl. “It’s him ain’t it, Carl? Pretty sure it’s him…dontcha think?”
“Shut up.”
“Oh, now don’t be like that Carl.” Albert took a pull from the longneck and gave a wet, beer-fizz, belching laugh. “You know it’s him…comes by like clockwork, he does.” He took another swallow. “I do believe that Clay Purcell boy’s got the hots for your darlin’ little girl.” He laughed outright this time.
“Told you…shut the fuck up.” Carl Stinson tossed his bottle across the yard in the direction of the pickup disappearing down the road. It shattered against something hard, hidden in the high grass.
