The Hunters Series: Volumes 1-3

by Glenn Trust

  “Got the little fucker!" he would shout triumphantly.

  If he was sitting in one of the old kitchen chairs on the bare wood porch, he'd raise his beer can in salute to the cat. George knew this because he had sat there many an evening with his own beer raised in salute to one of the felines.

  The insect buzzed at him again. This time he reached from the bed to the floor and retrieved it. Squinting at the number, he recognized Ronnie Kupman’s personal cell phone.

  “Hello.”

  “George? That you?”

  “What’s up, Ronnie?” George yawned loudly. Dragging himself from the bed, he walked into the front room of the apartment and stepped out onto the small second story porch in his underwear. The sun was high, but Fel was still mowing so it couldn’t be too late. “What time is it, Ronnie?”

  “Not quite ten, George.”

  “Ronnie, I’ve only been asleep a couple hours. Can’t this wait?”

  “You gotta come in, George.”

  “No way, Ronnie, I’ve been up all night,” he said. “Who called in sick?” He yawned again.

  George walked back inside squinting and scratching. The Sam Brown belt was draped over a kitchen chair. Dusty boots tumbled on their sides beside the chair, grayish white socks thrown over them.

  The Chief Deputy took a deep breath. George could be a good deputy…sometimes. Other times he was, well, he was from another time, the epitome of the redneck deputy. George presented just the kind of image that Sheriff Klineman was trying to end. Still, he had a way of being around when things happened, in the right place, or maybe the wrong place, at the right time. In any event, it didn’t matter now. This was some serious shit, and George was coming in.

  “George, put your boots on and come in. Now.”

  “Aw, Ronnie,” he rubbed one cold foot against the other.

  “Now, George.” He paused and added, “There was another killing.”

  George stopped in his tracks and closed his eyes as the image of Mrs. Sims pointed at him over the body of her dead husband.

  “What? What happened?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Where?”

  “Out on Tom Ridley’s road.”

  “What? Tom Ridley killed someone?” George sat down in the kitchen chair and reached down for his boots, the phone against his ear, crooked in his neck.

  “No, no. Not Tom. Tom found the body. Some girl. Haven’t ID’ed her yet, but you were working the beat last night, and the sheriff wants you in, immediately. You got it? Right now, George.”

  “I hear you, Ronnie. Be there soon.”

  “And George, start thinking about anything you might have seen last night. We don’t have much on this one. Nothing really. Anything you have is gonna be more than we have now. Oh yea, one more thing, the GBI is here. They’re gonna take lead on this case too, so try to look like a sheriff’s deputy, please.” Ronnie hung up and George started pulling his boots off again so that he could put his pants on.

  Ronnie Kupman knew, and George knew, that Ronnie had saved his job a couple of times when the sheriff would have let George go as a throwaway to the past.

  Ronnie Kupman also knew that, while George might be a throwback to a different era in police work, he was not a throwaway. He was a natural hunter. He knew where to be when the bad guy showed up. He was sloppy in his personal demeanor, some thought slovenly and lazy, but he was a good deputy. Who knows, in a big city like Atlanta, he might have been a great detective. Probably not though, George was one of those who did not fit in. Scruffy and unkempt, he didn’t know how to fit in, and funny thing was, he didn’t even know that he didn’t fit in.

  Still, they could use his help now. Ronnie looked across the small dirt road to the covered bundle in the brush. His face twitched at the grisly pictures that flashed across his mind. Bad. Real bad. He wondered what the animal that had done this looked like.

  With slightly shaky hands, he lit a cigarette and looked down at his boots in the dust. He was surprised to see a little smudge of blood from the girl’s body on the side of his right boot. He scraped the boot in the dirt trying to scrub the blood off.

  He inhaled deeply and looked across the road again. An animal did this. They needed a hunter. They needed George right now.

  36. Other Plans

  Henry watched the two young men tramp out of the truck stop cafe. One, the younger one, stopped as if he were going to come back, but the girl at the booth just looked down at the slip of paper he had given her. She wouldn’t look up at him. After a moment, the young man followed his brother to their truck.

  Such a tender scene. Henry gave a grunt of disgust. He sat at the booth watching the girl and playing with his coffee cup. Glancing down at his watch, he smiled. He didn’t have to be in Chattanooga until tomorrow. Plenty of time. More than enough time. He held his coffee cup up and caught the waitress’ attention, waving the cup at her.

  The waitress got a hard look on her face and walked over with the coffee pot. She didn’t like people waving cups at her. It was about as rude as pointing a finger or whispering. She sloshed coffee into Henry’s cup, deliberately careless.

  “Hey!” the big man said. “Try to get some in the cup, girl.” Henry grabbed some napkins out of the dispenser on the table and sopped up the spilled coffee.

  “Hey, yourself,” the waitress replied, looking down at him, a hand on a hip and raised eye brows, like a mother eyeing a misbehaving child. “Where’d you learn your manners?”

  “Same place you learned to pour coffee, I guess,” Henry said looking up from the wet napkins on the table. He noticed the name tag on her chest, ‘Marla’. He also noticed the full bosom underneath the tag. He could just make out the bra beneath the tight, white fabric of her synthetic waitress dress. At that point, he smiled up at her, but his eyes stayed on her breasts.

  Marla shook her head and walked off. Truck drivers, she thought. What a bunch of pigs. Aware that Henry was staring at her ass as she walked, she threw a little more sway into her stride. Let the fat pig try to get that out of his mind tonight, jacking off in the cab of his truck.

  Henry watched her go. In fact, he was looking at Marla’s ass. A little plump, but he wouldn’t kick her out of bed. She wasn’t really his type though, mouthy with lots of attitude. He liked them more…subdued.

  Henry turned his thoughts from the temporary distraction of Marla’s tits and ass back to the young girl at the table across the room. Nope, Marla was definitely not his type. Henry had something else on his mind.

  Unaware of Henry’s attention, Lyn lifted her eyes from the napkin with Clay’s cell number printed carefully on it. She looked around the truck stop cafe. How would she know who to ask for a ride? Who would be safe, if anyone?

  Unable to focus on anything, the cafe and faces at the tables swirled around her in a kaleidoscope of movement and color, with no meaning and no point of reference. How would she find a ride? She had wanted to take Clay up on his offer, it was tempting, and she had almost found herself saying yes.

  But the need to see this through, whatever it was, burned inside her. After eighteen years of living in the hell created by her father, she couldn’t just take the first opportunity. It might be no better than what she had escaped. She had to do this or doubt herself the rest of her life. Besides, Daddy would be looking for her around Pickham County. She had to put more distance between them.

  After a while, she stood up and walked from the cafe into the truck stop store. She did not notice the large man who stood up from the booth across the room and walked at a distance behind her. He watched her ass as she walked.

  The big bosomed waitress, Marla, glanced up from her order pad. Just a fat pig, she thought. Looking at that young girl’s ass like he had any chance with her, or like he would know what to do with it if he got his hands on it. And she was just a child. Besides, he didn’t know what he was missing here, she thought, smoothing the tight dress over her thighs. His loss.

  Very
conscious of the other truckers’ eyes following her, waitress Marla put the coffee pot down and walked over to a customer that had just sat at a table. The tight white skirt undulated over her round bottom as she walked. They were all watching. She knew it and her hips swayed more widely. The round bottom rolled wonderfully under the tight dress, to the delight of all the large men in the room.

  Coming to the table, she caressingly smoothed the back of her skirt over her bottom and smiled at her customer. “What can I get you, hon?” she asked. The truck driver returned the smile appreciatively.

  Henry was long gone and would have paid her no mind anyway. Henry had other plans.

  37. “Jesus, Mary and all the Saints”

  The gravel road to Tom Ridley’s house was blocked. Deputy George Mackey had to park the dusty, county issued pickup at the end of a long line of emergency vehicles. He made his way up the dirt road past four other county cars, two GBI investigative units, a crime scene processing unit also from the GBI, an ambulance and Timmy Farrin’s van from the radio station in Everett. Timmy was probably providing a feed to the Savannah news channels, or hoping to.

  The vehicles were all lined as far to the right as possible on the narrow dirt road. There were no flashing lights. That was all movie stuff. In real life, emergency lights were only used when necessary, as a warning to traffic, or to move people out of the way, or to alert the bad guy to stop. There was no traffic out here on this dusty road, just the humming of grasshoppers in the weeds along the side, and the bad guy, whoever he was, was long gone.

  Up ahead, closest to the scene, he saw a black Cadillac hearse from Morton’s Funeral Parlor. Two men, one short and one tall, in dark suits were leaning against it smoking. They seemed incongruously casual and unconcerned, as if they were waiting for the dinner bell at a Sunday church social after services.

  Just beyond the hearse, yellow tape marked repetitively, “Crime Scene Do Not Cross” was stretched across the road. The tape extended into the woods several yards on both sides, but went further on the right a good fifty feet or so.

  He came even with the two men leaning on the hearse.

  “How you boys doin?” he said, walking by.

  “Doin’ good, George. Yourself?” the tall one said

  “Had better days.” He reached for the yellow tape to lift it.

  “Yeah, well this one is bad. Pretty little girl. Bad.” The tall mortician shook his head and took a drag on his cigarette, leaning his head towards his younger, shorter companion he said something inaudible.

  George stepped under the tape and into the crime scene. The hearse driver’s words fading behind him, he couldn’t help but wonder what in the world would prompt a person to take up undertaking as a career. They gave him the creeps. The men were harmless in themselves, but their casual and unconcerned manner was somehow eerie and disconcerting. George was used to death and mayhem. Even out in the Georgia countryside, bad things happened—car wrecks, assaults, bar fights, and shootings. But when the police or ambulance or fire department arrived on the scene, they were busy trying to do something about it. The undertakers just stood there, smoking and waiting. Like they were picking up a package. Nothing special. Just picking up another package for delivery to a hole scratched in the sandy south Georgia soil.

  It was probably not fair to judge them that way. It was just their way of dealing with a bad situation. Still, it gave him the creeps.

  Timmy Farrin called to him as he walked over to where Sheriff Klineman and Ronnie Kupman were standing.

  “George, they won’t let me past the tape. How about letting me know what’s happening. I got all the TV stations in Savannah waiting for some word. They got their people on the way, but right now, I’m it. Be something if we could scoop them and get the story out before they get here. Put Pickham County on the map.”

  George looked at him and shrugged, “Timmy, you know I can’t do that,” and then added more loudly for the sheriff’s benefit, “All statements have to come from the sheriff’s office or the GBI.” It was a deliberately clumsy and blatantly insincere statement, intended more to annoy the sheriff than ingratiate himself with him.

  He stepped over to the sheriff and Kupman.

  “What’s up, boss?”

  The sheriff’s gaze held a look of resigned displeasure. They both knew he didn’t like George. Right now, he was a necessary inconvenience. Ronnie was convinced that George could add something to the investigation. The GBI agent, Shaklee had echoed the sentiment, and for the moment, Sheriff Klineman would solicit assistance from any source. There was an election at stake. To answer the question he had shouted rhetorically back at the office, two murders in one day in Pickham County was ‘a fucking crime wave’. If they thought George could help, so be it.

  George knew everyone. He had lived there all his life. Still, being sheriff and having George as a deputy was like fishing with worms. The fishing could be good, but every now and then, you had to reach in the can and grab another slimy worm to bait the hook. For the sheriff, dealing with George was like reaching into the worm can. He liked being sheriff, but he still had to touch the worms every now and then.

  As George walked up, Klineman stated firmly, “All statements will come from the sheriff’s office, not the GBI. Are you clear on that Deputy?”

  “Sure. Absolutely Sheriff.” George thought about spitting tobacco juice near the sheriff’s feet, but this was a crime scene, and he didn’t want to contaminate it. Still…

  Ronnie Kupman stepped in quickly. “Come on, George. Want you to take a look at things.” He led George away.

  Kupman was different. He genuinely liked George, although he wished George would clean up his act and his boots some, and play the game with the sheriff and citizens a bit more politically. He saw no reason why the common sense of good old police work by good old boys couldn’t be combined with an appreciation for advancements in police technology and procedure. He also acknowledged that times had changed, for permanent. The old days and ways were gone. He accepted that as progress. He knew that George had a difficult time with the change. He also knew that that was why George would likely never be more than a road deputy. But, they needed road deputies, and George was a good one. To Kupman’s mind, George’s common sense methods and modern law enforcement practice were not mutually exclusive, although he recognized that in George’s case they were often mutually antagonistic.

  “Follow me, George. Got a bad one here,” Ronnie Kupman took a drag on his cigarette as if to take a bad taste out of his mouth. “Over here.”

  He led George across and off the right shoulder of the dirt road and into the brush. George followed exactly in Ronnie’s footsteps. He didn’t know what was there and didn’t want to destroy any evidence that might be lying in the dusty weeds.

  They walked beside a patch of grass and weeds that were beaten down as if something had been dragged over them. Ronnie stopped, knelt and pulled the sheet back that had been placed over the girl’s body while the investigation continued. George came up even with him.

  “Jesus.”

  “Yep. Jesus, Mary and all the saints. Not pretty.”

  Squatting a couple of feet from the nude body of the young girl, George eyed the scene from different perspectives. On the other side of the body, about ten feet away, a crime scene technician was bent over slowly looking through the grass and weeds. A bedspread was on the ground next to him, and another technician was using a tweezers to pluck fibers and other minute items of interest and place them in plastic bags. Bob Shaklee, the GBI man from the night before, was standing beside the crime scene techs. He nodded at George who nodded back before returning his eyes to the body.

  The girl appeared to be young, although the blood on her face and torso made it difficult to see. The blood seemed to come from slicing wounds on her face and body.

  Ronnie squatted next to George taking a drag on his cigarette, exhaling slowly and deliberately as if the smoke would somehow change the scene before
them as it cleared.

  “Lot of surface blood,” he said, inhaling deeply from the butt hanging from the side of his mouth.

  “Yeah.” George rocked back and forth with his forearms draped over his knees. “You shouldn’t be smoking around the body, Ronnie,” he added without taking his eyes off the body.

  “Yeah, I know. Couldn’t help myself.” He quickly stubbed the cigarette out on the pack of smokes and shoved the butt inside the pack.

  “Lot of surface blood. Messy, but the wounds aren’t deep enough to kill. The son of a bitch wanted to hurt her. Probably took his time with each cut. Cause the most pain.” George looked down at the dirt between his boots and shook his head. “Fucking animal.”

  “Yep.”

  There was nothing more to say as they took it all in. Squatting on their haunches in the Georgia dust and weeds alongside a dirt road, they contemplated what must have been the horror of the girl’s last hours.

  Sheriff Klineman came up behind them. There was something vaguely annoying about seeing them squatting in the dust like a couple of old dirt farmers talking about the rain and crops. Of course, that was the life they had both come from. Backcountry, Georgia dirt farmers. The sheriff’s department had been one of the few ways out of that life, although George still clung to his roots a lot more than Ronnie did. He shook his head at the site of the two squatting dirt farmers wearing the uniforms of deputies.

  “So what do you think?”

  George looked up. Ronnie stood up.

  “Well,” George said slowly rising, “she’s dead.”

  The sheriff’s face reddened. The look on Kupman’s face was a warning to play nice, so George added nonchalantly, “Took her a long time to get that way. She was cut to cause pain, not to kill her.”

  “Yep, that’s what the GBI said, too,” Ronnie Kupman added to direct the sheriff further away from George’s comment. He shot George a look that said, ‘knock it the fuck off, Deputy’!