by Lawton Paul
……
Angela wakes alone, chained to a skinny pine tree in the woods near the 17 intersection. Pain shoots through her arm as she taps the top of her pocket, but the phone isn’t there. Her head is pounding. She looks around and the truck is gone. There’s blood on her shirt, little dried rivulets down her arm. She touches her forehead and there’s a bandage.
A moment later she hears the muffled sound of an old phone. It’s her ringtone. Walt thought it was funny, it sounded just like the old rotary phone in the cottage. Maybe the sheriff threw her cell there, maybe it flew, she didn’t know.
And then another thought hits: Where is Dog?
“Dog,” she says softly, her throat dry. She worries her words don’t make it to the other side of the road. Then worries if they do, who will come.
No response. She shifts her weight and stretches her back, more arm pain.
“Doooog,” she says a little louder. Still nothing. If he was anywhere near he’d come to me.
Behind her she hears footsteps, a pine branch cracking. She knows his barber-shop, hair-tonic smell before he gets there: the sheriff. She wonders if words will come.
“You got me chained up like Mrs. Kaufman. You gonna kill me, too?” she says, high-pitched and breathless.
“She started squawkin’,” says the sheriff, still behind her. “All you had to do was shut up.” His voice low and somber like this was the end and no going back. And now she can smell musty sweat mixed in with the barbasol. Her breaths start coming faster and she fights for control.
“I had to keep her there” he says. “But I brought her food and took care of her. I was there to protect her before Walt came. You can’t just have that kind of power and not attract the wrong types. People find out. They talk. I’d shut ‘em up. But then Walt came. He was like a damn billboard all lit up: Come and get it. He was gonna give it away. I heard ‘em talkin’. Kraut, mainly, but then and again it was English. He cared about her. Not so much for you.”
“You don’t know anything about him!” she screams. And the anger brings her voice back, strong again for a moment. “He brought us to Chickasaw to save me.”
“That’s where you got it wrong, Angela,” says the sheriff, walking around to face her. He squats down in front of her and holds her chin in his hand. Looks her in the eye.
“I saved you,” he says.
She jerks her head to the side. “Don’t touch me!” she says.
“Walt was gonna write about it,” the sheriff says. “He was gonna tell the world. And then you know what happens after that. Unmarked black GMC trucks just like in the movies. They come and take it away. And then you die. And Freakboy dies. And a bunch of other people in Chickasaw. Some that know they’re protected, some that are just fortunate and ignorant. He was gonna choose fame over you and everybody else in town. But I wasn’t gonna let that happen.”
Angela starts to cry and the words don’t come. She doesn’t want to cry in front of him. Finally, one word escapes. “Bastard!”
“I saved you!”
“You saved yourself! I didn’t have a chance to talk to Walt. And how about poor Johnny?”
“He’ll be okay. I know people. I’ll make sure he’s safe once he gets inside.”
The sheriff stands in front of her and she can see the intersection in the distance through the trees. A light green Honda pulls up to the stop sign and Angela starts screaming. It’s a woman with the window rolled up. Angela screams HELP as loud as she can and the sheriff turns casually and watches the car roll by. The woman doesn’t hear, doesn’t even look their way. The sheriff turns around again to face Angela and that’s when she sees the flash of gray.
Dog attacks from behind. The sound of the car and Angela’s screaming mask his approach, and the sheriff never hears him until it’s too late. The big German shepherd, fully unleashed, ears laid back against its neck, growling deep and low, sinks his teeth into the fat man’s neck. The sheriff falls down, reaching up to free himself from the wild animal tearing into his flesh. Dog flips over and hits the ground, loses his grip on the sheriff, slides across the brown pine straw, finds his legs and immediately attacks again, front canines red with blood and torn shirt.
The sheriff stands like a fighter after an eight count, takes a wobbly step back, instinctively reaches for his gun, but it isn’t there. The calm, self-satisfaction of a moment ago is gone. He looks around for a stick or a rock, but nothing: just spindly pines.
Dog comes at him again with a single-minded ferocity that scares Angela. The sheriff puts his hands up to protect his face and Dog sinks his teeth into his forearm and the man starts to moan and wail, his face red and wet, pine straw in his hair. And Angela wonders, even though the bastard killed Walt, if she really wants to see him die in front of her. But this moment of compassion is gone when the sheriff lands a boot to Dog’s ribcage.
Dog whelps and falls off to the side as the sheriff, arms and neck bloody, scrambles like a crab toward the road, his eyes never leaving the animal. Dog gets to his feet and walks calmly to his kill, past Angela like she’s not there. Like this isn’t Dog. Like someone flipped a switch inside him, and now he’s another dog, a trained killer that’s done this before.
Sheriff crawls to the road, half on his back, half on hands and knees. He throws a rock and Dog calmly dodges to one side and it flies past, hitting a tree with a loud THONK. The sheriff’s breaths are coming fast and he starts to hyper-ventilate. He makes it to the ditch near the road and slides down, giving the high ground to the hunter.
Angela can see the bottom of his boots and he flops around, breaths coming in little hoarse gasps. But suddenly he’s pulled up a muddy stick and he’s got both hands on it. And then Angela hears the familiar sound of a rifle bolt sliding into place as a bullet is loaded. The sheriff holds her Winchester up and takes a second to clean some mud out of the trigger mechanism, just enough time for her to scream RUN!
Dog sees the gun, then darts off to the side between the trees. The sheriff takes a knee and one deep breath and squeezes off a round. Even before the sound of the shot dies down he’s pulled the bolt back and chambered another. This time he jumps forward out of the ditch onto the higher ground and uses a tree to steady the rifle. He fires again and immediately Angela hears a short whelp. The bullet finds Dog and Angela can do nothing but cry.
The sheriff falls down into the pine needles and lays there, still trying to get enough air. Finally he stands and points the rifle at Angela.
“Where is it?” he says.
“What?”
The sheriff hits her across the face with an open hand—her vision flashes white, ears ringing, throbs of pain.
“The power. Y’all think I didn’t know about that? I don’t have time to play. Tell me or I take someone else away from you.”
“I honestly don’t know where it is. Somewhere around Mrs. Kaufman’s house.”
“Okay. I guess I gotta visit the B&B. I’m going to kill Bo because you won’t tell me.” He turns and walks off.
“No, wait. It’s under the mango tree. The epicenter is buried under the mango tree. She told me.”
He turns around, smiling.
“If you are lying I’ll kill the old bitch.” He takes a deep breath, dabs a handkerchief on the bloody wound at his neck, winces in pain, then looks down at her. “I should kill you now. But that’d be difficult to sell. No. You gonna off yerself. Everyone knows you had your troubles.” He unzips a small pouch and pulls out a syringe. Angela pulls against the chains. He holds her still and sticks her in the upper arm. The needle stings for a moment and then she feels nothing.
Bastard Sheriff
Greg hits 120 mph down 17 to the intersection, the BMW in the red most of the way. Carl clings to the side door handle and closes his eyes while Larry, holding the laptop, watches as the little blue dot that marks their car slowly move on top of the little yellow dot that is Angela’s phone.
“This is the spot!” yells Larry, just past the inte
rsection. Greg slams on the brakes and everyone lurches forward, the car coming to a sliding stop.
Greg jumps out and starts yelling, “Angela! Angela!” Larry, still glued to the laptop, runs down into the ditch then starts heading back into the woods, still tracking the two dots. Soon Greg joins the search and they crawl around on hands and knees, sifting through pine needles. After a few minutes Larry says, “What are we doing? Greg, call Angela’s phone.” He calls and instantly they hear Angela’s ringtone twenty yards deeper into the woods.
The men stare down at the phone, bare aluminum showing through the chipped black paint around the edges, mud covering the camera lens, afraid to touch it. Finally Larry reaches for it. “Let’s check her last call.”
“No,” says Greg. “What if the asshole left a fingerprint?”
“He’s not that stupid.”
“You’re probably right, but use these just in case and hold it at the edges,” says Greg, handing him a pair of exam gloves.
“So you walk around with latex gloves in your pocket?” Larry says, then carefully picks the phone up and taps the screen.
“I’m an ME,” Greg says. “Or was.”
Larry checks the recent calls on Angela’s phone. “Yeah. Last call to me. Nothing since.” He slides the phone inside one of the gloves.
They come out of the woods and Carl is standing in the center of the intersection, staring down at the street, holding Bo’s big gun. He uses the gun like a pointer, aims the barrel at a set of skid marks starting at the middle of the intersection, follows them straight to the ditch. Then traces the path of another group of skid marks off to the side. “A car come thisaway and hit another car sittin’ here in the intersection. Look at all the glass on the street.”
Little sparkly bits of glass were scattered across the road. Carl picks a piece up. “Probably headlight.”
“Hers?” says Greg.
“Don’t know,” says Carl. “She had to be headin’ thataway.” He aims the gun down 17.
“Then maybe it wasn’t her?” says Greg. Carl just stood there, his shoulders drooping and the gun no longer a pointer, now just a weight held limp in his hands. And then Greg remembers: the damn phone. Maybe she drove by and threw it out?
And then Larry points into the ditch on the other side of the road. There’s an old blackwall tire. Carl takes one look and let’s out a long sigh. “That’s her spare. Must’a got knocked out when shitferbrains hit her.”
……
The sheriff pulls the Torino into the Salheimer’s driveway as dusk gives way to darkness. He keeps his lights off coming in. Kaufman’s kraut neighbors are gone again for the weekend, the damn dog is dead, and Angela’s little band of morons are by now homing in on the phone, he thinks. Too damn smart for their own good.
He pulls the thin woman out of the car and carries her limp body to the backyard. He looks down at her face, thin and perfect, her long brown hair flowing across his arms. He stops, thinks of his daughter, taken from him when she was a child, his wife not long after. Wonders why God would save him from his illness by the crazy kraut. But not them.
He waits there for a moment in the darkness under the big oaks near the river. He kneels down, brushes the hair out of her eyes, her breathing steady.
A boat goes past and he stands, moves behind some azalea bushes. This has to be done, he thinks. No way around it. She is a crusader. She’ll dig and scream and dig and scream until Chickasaw gets on the radar of a far more powerful enemy than some pie-in-the-sky economist and his sanctimonious wife.
Kaufman died, and now her. See, people die in Chickasaw. There’s nothing here worth mention. That’s the story. Maybe that bitch at the mullet wrapper in town can tell it.
He heads for the Salheimer’s dock, places her carefully in their little aluminum john boat. Oh, Kaufman’s kraut pals are gonna love this. Using their boat. A redneck, idiot wouldn’t think of something like this. They think he only knows brute force trauma. But killing yourself in a boat and floating down the river? That’s fucking poetic. The death of an intellectual. He smiles, places her in the boat, her head resting in the bow.
And then he stamps the woman’s thumb and forefinger on either side of a razor blade.
“I’m truly sorry,” he whispers to her.
He makes a small, but deep incision to her thigh, then tosses the stainless blade into the boat as the deck goes from red to glossy black. Even the JPD idiots will find that, he thinks.
The sheriff kicks the boat out into the river and it spins around, caught by the current and heads down river.
White Lady
In the dream Angela is running through the woods in the dark towards the river. On dry ground the hollies scratch at her, grab her hair, but as she angles towards the water and mud its just the occasional cypress tree towering over. She looks up and can see the stars through the delicate leaves—the moon bright and strong. Tonight she’ll find him.
She hears Walt’s voice: “Angela. Angela.” There is comfort in the deep, steady sound of it. She misses Dog and she’s lost the Winchester but nothing can touch her right now in this place. He calls again and she runs to the sound, louder than before. Her name, repeated over and over, like a beacon, draws her to him. And finally, there, staring out at the river, is Walt.
She hugs him. Feels his warmth, his body, his smell. He kisses her and she starts to remember. This can’t be just a dream.
“You know I brought you to Chickasaw so you could get better,” he says. “I’m sorry you had to find out in such a difficult way. I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to tell you everything. Marlina. Germany. But you know now.”
“I want to stay here with you,” Angela says.
“There’s still work to do, Angela. It’s gonna be a hard road, but I know you can do it.”
“Do what?”
“You’ll know what to do. Dog is coming. He’s bringing something you’ll need. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she says and holds onto him for a little while longer.
He looks at her and she can feel she’s about to go, about to wake up. “Live,” he says. “Live!”
……
Dubhe and Merak point straight to Polaris, and once you’ve got Polaris you are never lost. That’s true north. It’s her father’s voice, when she was a child, pointing out the tiny pinholes of light in the night sky. There are more stars in Chickasaw, the old lady used to say. See Daddy, I’m not lost. Mizar, Alioth, Tania Borealis. I remember them all.
And then she can’t see anything. But she can smell the damp, musty, earth and blood smell of a dog. And he licks her face for awhile—a sign of friendship. Whimpering, cajoling, friendship. And with that the softness of his coat, and a spot of cold on her face: the jangly little dog tag the old lady put on his collar.
This is a good place, right here, she thinks. But there was something to do, something to be. A mission. The dog is coming, he said. Who said? And then it starts to rise up again, the dark memory she forgot. She can feel it snake its way up through her body like a cancer coming for her heart.
Walt is gone.
She wants to cry, but can’t. The dog moves and she can see the stars again, see the dog. He barks, so loud it hurts.
She remembers the dog. “Hey, Dog,” she says, glad to see him. The words come from her but feel garbled and processed, like they exited from some hidden speaker, a separate part of her. He barks again and drops a shiny little weight on her stomach.
Instantly her body comes online, tingly and warm. She wants to reach for the shiny metal but can’t. Her arms don’t move. Dog barks again. Walt said Live. She wills her arm to action and she grabs the metal in her hand. Marlina’s pendant.
She holds it to her chest and energy surges through her body. She takes a deep breath, and another. Sit up, she says aloud. And she does. Look around. She is in a boat pinned against a dock.
“So this is the power, huh?” she says to Dog, holding up the shiny pendant. “And you
knew the whole time.” Her words still coming from another place, her movements odd and deliberate. Walt said Live, but is this alive? No, this is the difficult part. The energy field surrounds her and Dog like an extension of her being. It holds her in place, holds her up, allows her to speak when she should be lying at the bottom of an aluminum john boat in a few inches of her own sticky blood.
“You look like shit, Dog,” she says. His right hind leg black with dried blood. But he just stares back. Waiting. Then he scrambles onto the dock favoring his rear leg and looks back at her. Time to go. He’s done this before. And then she remembers the other thing: the mission. The sheriff. And her will mixes with the energy field and she commands herself to stand, to reach for the dock, to move her legs. I’m gonna kill the bastard.
She stands on the dock, reaches down for Dog. Grabs his collar for support and even on three legs he guides her to the back yard. Who’s house? I don’t know. We must be miles down by now.
Her legs move, feet touch the grass, and she goes forward, but this isn’t walking, it’s more like being propelled. There’s no time to stop and ponder her current situation. There are more important things to do. Live. Live.
She stands with Dog at the back of the house, a light on in the kitchen window. It’s a newer home with a two-car garage and a truck in the driveway. Angela knows she can’t walk far, and Dog is limping, a black spot on his leg: a nice, clean hole from her .423. Thank God I had target rounds loaded; and thank God for the pendant, she thinks. Dog pulls her towards the truck. “We need a driver,” she says.
Dog barks and a lady opens the garage door. “That you, Sally? Sally?”
“We need a ride down the street to Bo’s B&B,” says Angela.
The lady turns the light on and screams. Slams the door shut. And Dog barks again. Soon she opens it a crack, her hand on her mouth and panic on her face.
