Nowhere USA: The Complete Series: A Psychological Thriller series (Nowhere, USA)

by Ninie Hammon

  Viola Tackett! She was going to kill people.

  He knew better than to leap up, so he rose carefully, weathered the dizziness and looked around. Persimmon Ridge was … that way. He took out running again.

  Fish had been running/hobbling/stumbling down the road for long enough to work up a full body sweat when he heard the sound of an approaching car. He turned so rapidly the motion knocked him off balance and he almost fell in the middle of the road. Which, as it turned out, was a good thing because Orville Chandler had to stop or run over him. He blared his horn, rolled down his window and yelled at Fish.

  “Get out of the road, you old fool, ‘fore you get yourself run over.”

  Fish had the presence of mind to remain standing in front of Orville’s car so he couldn’t drive away.

  “Please, help, you have to—”

  “I don’t have to do jack squat. All’s I have to do is get into town and get signed up on that list of Viola’s Tackett’s.”

  “List?”

  “Oh, come on, get out of the way.”

  “What list?”

  “Gus Hinkle called last night. He heard from Buster Willard who heard from Sam Hunt that Viola’s gonna be handing out gasoline, but you got to sign up.”

  “Gasoline?”

  “Yeah, gas. She’s gonna be giving it out free—”

  That’s how she was going to gather up all the suspects in the murder of her daughter.

  “Orville, listen to me, that’s not why Viola Tackett wants everybody to—”

  “She tell you something different, did she?”

  “No, but—”

  “Didn’t think so. Just get out of my way, you old drunk, or I swear I’ll run you down where you stand.”

  Would Orville really run over him?

  Fish was about to find out. He stood frozen for only a moment, then he collapsed into the asphalt, suspected he looked like the scarecrow on The Wizard of Oz dropping boneless into the cornfield dirt.

  “What the—?”

  Orville hammered his horn. Hammered it again, held it for a long blast.

  Then Fish heard him open his door, cursing and sputtering, “Worthless drunk … oughta mash you like roadkill …”

  Fish was not a big man, and the years of all unbridled alcoholism had ravaged his body, leaving him literally scarecrow thin, and pitifully weak.

  But desperation fueled him that day, and when Orville Chandler leaned down to grab his foot, preparing to drag his limp body out of the road, Fish kicked out with the force of a mule. He caught Orville smack in the middle of the family jewels and then it was Orville who was splayed out in the middle of the road. Fish leapt to his feet, ran to the door Orville had left open and jumped behind the wheel. Orville had dropped to his knees and then rolled over onto his side, clutching his gonads, too shocked and in too much pain to speak. But as Fish put the car in reverse and pulled back from his body, Orville began to yell.

  “You drunken …” followed by expletives as profane and colorful as any Fish had ever heard.

  The words faded into the distance behind Fish as he drove away from Orville’s body, away from the cemetery in the direction of the Middle of Nowhere.

  He literally slid to a stop in the parking lot of the veterinary clinic, likely looked like a slalom skier at the bottom of a hill. If there’d been snow, he’d have plowed a wave of it up onto the clinic steps.

  Leaping out of the car, he almost fell. He was weak, nothing to eat, and the adrenaline that had fueled his car theft was leaving him. Only a little farther, he told himself, ping-ponging off the roof post, and then the door jamb as he staggered into the waiting room.

  Nobody was seated at the reception desk. The room’s only occupant was an old man he didn’t recognize, so he ran through the doorway into the hallway of the clinic. Nobody was there, either so he just yelled out.

  “Hey, somebody. Charlie, Sam, Malachi. Somebody …” Then the last of his energy reserves gave out and he drooped to his knees.

  “Help. Somebody, help.”

  Raylynn Bennett appeared at a doorway about halfway down the hall.

  “Where’s Charlie?” Fish cried. “Sam or Malachi … where?”

  “They’re not here. You just missed them. They went to Fearsome Hollow to—”

  “Not here?” Fish couldn’t process that. “When will they be back?”

  Raylynn shook her head slowly, a frightened little girl.

  “I don’t know … they might not—”

  “Might be they ain’t coming back.” Pete Rutherford had appeared in a doorway farther down the hallway. His already gruff voice had a ragged edge.

  Fish stared at him in disbelief.

  “But … but I have to talk …” He looked beseechingly into Pete’s eyes. “You don’t understand. They have to stop her.”

  “Stop who?”

  “Viola Tackett. She’s … she’s going to shoot people.”

  “What people?”

  “Anybody. Everybody. And she won’t stop until …” His voice failed and he drew a shuddering breath. “She won’t stop. Not ever. Not until they’re all dead.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Judd Perkins’ phone rang as he was closing his back door behind him and he almost didn’t bother to go back inside to answer it. But it might be Doreen, something with the girls. He’d finally convinced her to move back into the house with him, so he could look after them. She was packing them up today and they’d be here when he got back tonight from his turn sitting up with E.J.

  E.J. was going to die. Judd wasn’t no doctor, but you didn’t have to have no medical degree to see that the man was failing. He wouldn’t likely live long enough to get rabies, which was not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all. Oh, it wasn’t that Judd had given up hope that they’d get out of this thing, that somebody’d … well, do something and the Jabberwock would vanish quick as it’d come and they’d get E.J. to a doctor in time. He still hoped …

  No, he didn’t. He wouldn’t let anybody — Doreen or the girls or E.J., anybody — know that, of course, know he didn’t believe no more. Shoot, he wouldn’t even let himself know it most of the time. But in his heart of hearts a coldness had settled in. Partly fear, maybe mostly fear. But resignation, too. Like he’d felt when he finally accepted that Mildred’s cancer wasn’t going to get no better, that she wasn’t going to get well and grow all her hair back and fix him eggs and pancakes for breakfast and train Buster to answer commands in German.

  When he’d understood the reality of that, had shifted that gear, his whole world perspective had changed. The hole in his belly where hope had been was so huge at first he was afraid his whole self would fall into it and disappear. But his focus had been sharper, too. Like tunnel vision, seeing something through binoculars. Every second, every breath his precious Mildred took was significant after that. He took note of every one. Paused on every one, appreciated and was grateful for the breath and didn’t demand anything beyond that. In that instant, he was merely grateful for that frozen moment of time, didn’t spoil it by pining away for what he didn’t have.

  He had felt that shift in himself again in the past couple of days. Ever since E.J. had given his life to save Michelle and Julie Ann, Judd’d watched E.J. slip away and hope slipped away with him. Now, when Judd was honest with himself, which he wouldn’t allow himself to be very often, he acknowledged that every breath of every person in the county — his daughter and precious granddaughters — everybody, was to be treasured and appreciated. They wouldn’t last.

  Soon’s he got home tonight, he was gonna set both them girls in his lap and tell them funny stories like Mildred used to do when they was little. He’d tell tales about Buster, too. He hadn’t mentioned the dog’s name to the girls since … Judd had dug a deep hole near the back fence and buried what was left of the poor thing soon’s he got home from taking E.J. to Sam. But tonight, he was gonna talk about Buster. Wasn’t the dog’s fault what’d happened. It was Judd’s for not g
etting him vaccinated. All the dog had ever done was be a good, loyal friend and Judd wasn’t going to dishonor his memory by acting like he hadn’t never existed. He was going to hug the little girls close, smell the fruity clean smell of their freshly washed hair, and glory in every breath they took.

  He didn’t know what form their end would take, but he would be there with his family to love and protect them until that final breath. He hoped they’d be ‘lowed to take that one together.

  Stepping back into the house, Judd went to the phone on the kitchen wall and lifted the receiver.

  “‘Lo.”

  “Pete Rutherford, here. We got ourselves a problem.” Judd coulda said, “Tell me something I don’t already know,” but the tone of Pete’s voice silenced him. “Need you to get your rifle and lots of ammunition. Meet me and Lester at the hardware store.”

  Then Pete told him why.

  “It seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.”

  Lester Peetree smiled as the words formed in his head. Our Town. Mr. Fischer had let Lester’s son, William Lester Peetree, Jr. — just Willie — read the part of the narrator of the play when the boy was in high school — because Lester had begged Fish to. He’d thought the experience of reading it aloud would paint the words on his son’s soul the way his own reading of it, alone in his bedroom, squinting at the words on the library book page, had done for him. He’d been wrong. Willie hadn’t cared a fig about Our Town, had been bored by the experience of reading it aloud in front of a bunch of disinterested, pimple-faced teenagers in Holmes Fischer’s English class. Even though the play had completely changed his father’s whole life.

  Okay, maybe not changed it, but certainly informed it. That play, superimposed on all the years since he’d read it, had been the lens through which Lester Peetree had viewed the world. He sometimes thought that just about all the wisdom there was in all the world was contained within that single Pulitzer Prize-winning drama.

  Well, except the part about going to a country where they didn’t speak English. He’d done that. He had for a fact, and he had returned to testify, if anybody’d asked and nobody ever did, that it was way, way better to stay home, right where you was at, live life there and die there and never know what kind of incredible evil dwelled out there in the world beyond.

  Lester would say that today with as much conviction as he’d said it when he got home from Vietnam, spent miserable months enduring flashbacks of little kids with their clothes on fire, or dead bodies swollen and bloated and stinking — cows, pigs, people. Or the unrecognizable corpses of dead friends. Or a leg. Just a leg. Ripped off at the thigh, naked — no uniform pants, no socks or boots. Lester had been ridiculously troubled by that at the time, thought about it for months. George Phillips. Lester had seen him just moments before the world erupted into tiny points of brilliant light and the man’s body had been completely blown apart by a mortar shell, pieces flung into the faces of his friends. So … where were George’s pants? How could a mortar shell blow your boots and socks off? How could that be?

  Lester would have said then that the most profound evil in the world could be defined with one little word, three simple letters. W. A. R. War was all evil. Every second, every breath, every eye blink, nothing but evil.

  But war wasn’t all the evil there was. He had learned that, too, over the years. Certainly had had his nose rubbed in that reality since J-Day when an impossibility had changed reality and everybody in the county’s understanding of it. The thing, the Jabberwock, the monster that was systematically — what was it Charlie McClintock called it? Absorbing — everybody within the county’s borders was evil, too.

  It wasn’t all the evil, though. Human hearts … evil resided in human hearts, blackened and shriveled them.

  You couldn’t let that evil win. Not in war. Not in everyday life. You stood up to it or you couldn’t lay claim to any good in your own soul.

  Lester Peetree hadn’t fired his rifle in more than thirty years. To this day, didn’t know why he’d said yes when his sergeant offered to let him keep the weapon. He’d put the gun and his uniform away, along with the box of medals he had resolutely refused to allow anybody to see. Not even his wife. Willie had found them when he was ten years old and hauled them out, asked what they were. Lester’d sent the boy to his room, wouldn’t let him come down even for supper because he’d disobeyed Lester’s ironclad rule that nobody … nobody ever went into that storage room in the back corner of the hardware store. After that, Lester kept it secure with a padlock as big as his fist.

  Lester stood in the storage room now, lifting the rifle out of the scabbard and hating how natural it felt to hold the thing again. He slicked his hand over his bald head — shaved because bald was more attractive, or so Ramona had said, than the ever-expanding patch of bare skin that had attacked him before he even turned forty.

  He glanced at his watch. He was supposed to meet Pete Rutherford in the store at 11:30. Pete had said he’d be bringing along Judd Perkins. Judd was maybe ten years older, hadn’t served in Vietnam. But he was the acknowledged “best shot” in the county, as evidenced by all the game he’d felled — some from six, seven hundred yards — with one shot over the years and all the blue ribbons he’d won in the shooting contests at the county fair. Lester never entered those contests, so nobody ever knew he could likely out-shoot Judd Perkins seven ways to Sunday. Nobody ever would know, because Lester had put his rifle away when he got back home and never fired it again. Oh, he kept the rifle immaculate and in perfect working order, maintained like it was brand new. Every gun owner owed that kind of respect to his weapon. Just left it locked up was all. Same as everybody else in the county, he had other weapons he used for hunting, and sold all manner of them in the store — or had until somebody broke into it a week ago and stole every bit of inventory.

  They hadn’t stolen this rifle because didn’t nobody but Ramona know it even existed — well, Willie’d seen it that one time when he was a kid. It was locked away where nobody would ever steal it, where nobody would ever even fire it again — or so Lester had assumed when he put the gun out of sight, out of mind, in that storage room all those years ago.

  It was a Ruger 10/22 automatic with a suppressor. A sniper rifle.

  Lester Peetree had been a sniper. Served at a base in Da Nang in what the military called “Arizona Territory.”

  He never thought about it, had learned how not to think about it, but as he held the weapon now in his hands he considered the number again. Seventy-one. Lester Peetree had seventy-one confirmed kills from a two-year tour in Vietnam. There’d been more than that. Lots more. Those were just the ones that’d been “confirmed” by observers. Lester Peetree had killed way more than seventy-one Cong. Not as many as the Marine, Chuck Mawhinney, though, who had once landed sixteen headshots in thirty seconds in pitch black darkness. Mawhinney had 103 confirmed and 216 probable kills in just sixteen months in country.

  Lester’d never talked to the man — though he served in the Arizona Territory same as Lester — but he bet the Marine felt the same way Lester did about it. Lester’s job was to wipe evil off the face of the earth. Pure and simple. The Cong had been verifiably evil, demonstrably so. They were the enemy, of course, but they were way more than that. They were soul-less monsters who strapped bombs to little kids, burned old people alive and roasted rats on a stick in the flames. They stalked the jungles, killing whole villages full of innocent people, shooting them one after another, looking for a single American sympathizer.

  That’s what Pete Rutherford said Viola Tackett intended to do right here in Nowhere County.

  “She’s just gonna pick people at random and shoot ‘em, one after another until she finds out who killed her daughter. Fish said he thinks it was her own boy, Neb, done it. Accidental. But you ain’t never gonna convince Viola Tackett of that.”

  Lester had been at the county meeting w
here Liam’d got shot, believed it was Viola done it, though he had been where he couldn’t see so he didn’t know for sure. He did know she’d hanged that teenage boy, Martha Whittiker’s grandson … Dylan something. Just hanged him. It had fallen to Lester to take charge of the morgue in the basement of Bascum’s so he seen it all, up close and personal, had been the one took the rope off the boy’s neck where it had dug in so deep it would have bled, except there was no heart to pump blood by then.

  Wasn’t a doubt in Lester’s mind that Viola Tackett was evil, same’s the Cong. He was certain she would make good on her threat. Only thing standing between her and a mass murder was him, Pete and Judd Perkins. That woman didn’t have no conscience, no soul. Wasn’t no way to stop her but to put her down. Either him, Pete or Judd Perkins was gonna have to do just that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The boys had got back from they errands and most everything had gone according to Viola’s plan.

  She’d sent Zach in his fancy Vette to Pine Bluff Hollow, around Hollow Tree Ridge down to Poorfolk Hollow. She’d sent Obie to Nate’s Creek Hollow, through Killarney to Turkey Neck Hollow and back through Harrow Woods.

  She didn’t have nobody to send to Soloman Hollow, Little McGuire Hollow and down Lexington Road to Route 19 and Frogtown, but Zach got done quick so she sent him there. Didn’t send nobody to Fearsome Hollow cause didn’t hardly anybody live there.

  The boys honked they horns and called folks out of they houses to see their full tanks of gasoline, and handed out five-gallon cans to them as didn’t have enough gas to get to town for the meeting.

  Neb was driving Howie Witherspoon’s pokey old Dodge and he had stayed close, starting in Bugtussle Hollow, around Bishop Mountain to Freeman Hollow, then through Wiley to Chicory Hollow.

  Something was wrong with Neb. Viola didn’t know what it was, but something had got his goat. Must be the awful of finding his sister like that, shot and dying on the porch. Well, whoever’d done that grievous deed was gonna be held to account for it this day, and the group of men gathered before her on the too-tall grass in the front yard of the Tackett House was gonna help her administer justice.