Savage Reckoning

by C. Hoyt Caldwell

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, a good number of them fella-on-fella lovers got hair on their backs. That sort of thing can keep you entertained.”

  This made sense to Kenny. “What about the fellas without hair?”

  “Same thing with big ass versus skinny ass. Hairless-back fellas get picked last.”

  Kenny smiled and shook his head. “We sure live in strange times when a big ass and a hairy back get picked first at parties.”

  Step looked at his watch. “Get on with our business. I’m set to meet up with Bones after her shift.”

  Kenny cocked a grin and shouted out as he walked away, “Bones must have a hairy back because her ass ain’t big at all.” He quickened his pace as he moved through the darkness toward Son’s. The two men out front paid little attention to him as they talked and puffed away on their cigarettes. As far as they were concerned, he was just another drunkard in need of a tumbler or two.

  Step propped his forearms on the steering wheel and watched Kenny approach the two men. The man with the perfectly arched bill on his cap called out to them and they turned his way cautiously, but were otherwise unthreatened by his presence. The taller of the two men said something to Kenny. Kenny responded by aiming his gun and shooting the man in the head. The bullet entered through the right temple and blew the taller man’s ear to bloody pieces as it exited.

  The shorter man stood stunned as his friend collapsed to the wet sidewalk. Kenny turned the gun on him and attempted to pull the trigger, but it locked up. The stocky man turned and ran into the middle of the street. Kenny struggled with the gun a few seconds longer and then yelled out to Step, “Gun’s jammed!”

  Step flicked his smoldering cigarette out the window before he threw the truck into drive. The tires squealed as he raced toward the fleeing, squat man. For whatever reason, the fool never left the road. Like an idiot, he followed the solid yellow lines in the middle of the cracked street. It took just a few seconds before Step struck the man in the middle of his back with his bumper. The front end of the truck lifted up slightly as it passed over the portly little man and dragged him down the street.

  By the time the vehicle came to a stop at the only traffic light in town, Kenny had caught up to it and was pounding on the back side panel. He grabbed the bed as he bent over to catch his breath. “Sorry about that, Step. Fucking gun’s a piece of shit.”

  “Get in, goddamn it. I gotta clean the truck now before I pick up Bones.”

  Kenny opened the passenger door and climbed inside. “Gotta be more mindful of who we steal guns from. People just ain’t got no concept of responsible gun ownership these days. Gives the NRA a bad name.”

  Step shrugged. “What’s done is done. We’ll get paid just the same.”

  “I suppose,” Kenny said, removing his hat. He groaned when he realized the arch in the bill hadn’t kept its shape. His thick fingers got to work molding it into a form he could abide.

  Chapter 3

  Sheriff Otis Royal picked up the severed earlobe with his tweezers and studied it with his aging eyes. Thirty years of police work in his small bottomland community, full of hickbillies and born-agains, had brought more than an instance or two of backwoods bloodshed and brutality to his doorstep. He’d seen killings of every shape and size. This, however, was the first time he’d dealt with so many detached body parts. The victim on the sidewalk was short a slug’s width worth of head material, and the barfly on the street had been swatted down and torn asunder by a vehicle that was heavy and possessed an impressive amount of torque.

  Dani, Otis’s his niece and one of his three deputies, looked past his shoulder at the chunk of flesh. “Is that his ear?”

  “It is,” Otis said. “Part of it, anyway.”

  “What’s the rest of this stuff?” Dani asked as she stepped around him and bent down to examine the bits and pieces of the dead man’s head.

  “Blood, brain, and bone fragments,” Otis replied.

  “Well, that’s a mess.” Dani stood up. “He must have pissed someone off.”

  Otis placed the earlobe in a small evidence bag. “Whoever it was didn’t come from the bar.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I engaged in something called police work, little deputy. Interviewed a few bar patrons.”

  Dani felt her chiseled cheeks flush. She knew her uncle didn’t mean anything by calling her “little deputy,” but she still hated it. It was even more hurtful coming from him. She had hoped, in at least his eyes, that the badge she wore would conceal her slight stature. She had a feeling if Otis would stop calling her “little deputy,” the rest of the town of Baptist Flats would, too.

  “Son says it was a quiet night. Described the mood as jovial. Victim one here, Carl Williams, even bought the bar a round. Come into some good fortune, he said. Wanted to celebrate.”

  “His good fortune turned on him.”

  “That it did,” Otis said, pushing back his hat before he placed his hands on his hips.

  “What about victim two?”

  “Daryl Cartwright. Struck down by a vehicle of some sort. Truck or SUV probably, built out to have extra power by the looks of Daryl.”

  Dani stepped to the edge of the sidewalk. “That’s Daryl Cartwright?”

  “It is.”

  “He was a few years ahead of me in school. Knew him from elementary grades.” She looked at the pieces of Daryl that were scattered in the middle of the road. “Didn’t realize there was that much to him.”

  “You sprinkle a man around like that and he’ll cover a good bit of ground.”

  She adjusted her gun belt as it slid past her small waist and hugged her hips. “Where do you want me to get started?”

  Otis snorted and spit toward the doorway of the tavern. “Make sure Randle and Friar have the traffic under control. State police will be stopping by shortly.”

  “State police? This ain’t a matter for them.”

  “Double homicide lands on the state’s shoulders, little deputy. We ain’t got the resources for such a thing.”

  Dani controlled her building frustration. “Can’t hardly call it a double homicide without an investigation, Uncle Otis.”

  He held back a condescending smile. “You reckon the evidence points to natural causes, or something other than homicide?”

  She groaned. “Not what I was saying. I’m just saying we can’t know for sure what happened. Could be that Mr. Williams shot himself and poor ol’ Daryl was struck dumb by it. He just wandered off into the street where he was plowed down by a passing motorist on his or her way home.”

  Otis counted off the fallacies in her scenario. “One: If Williams shot himself, where’s the gun? Two: A man don’t buy a round in celebration of his good fortune before he kills himself. And three: Skid marks back yonder suggest our vehicle sped up before it struck down Daryl. That ain’t the normal behavior of a driver that runs over a man accidental-like.”

  “Well,” she said, turning up the street, “those are things to consider, I expect. Still say we should look into it before we pass it off to the state.”

  “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Dani, and I like that you want to put those two weeks of police training to use, but we got other things on our tiny plate to deal with today.”

  “Such as?”

  “That fella…Longwell, the politician, he’s coming through here about noon. Giving a speech over at the high school about something that don’t mean a damn thing.”

  “So?”

  “For whatever reason the man draws a crowd, and we gotta provide security. Didn’t you read the email I sent out last week?”

  “I stopped reading your emails, Uncle Otis,” Dani said as she walked up the sidewalk. “You’re always sending me links to cat videos or some god-awful joke.”

  “Those are meant to brighten your day.”

  “Well, they don’t,” she said, raising her voice to compensate for the growing distance between them. “All they do is remind
me how pathetic my life is when the best part of my day is watching some cat knock down a stack of pizza boxes.”

  He barked out a laugh. “Forgot about that one.” Otis paused to release a string of throaty chuckles. “Damn cat.”

  She approached the skid marks on the opposite side of the road and tried to picture the type of vehicle they belonged to, because she imagined that’s the sort of thing a crime scene investigator would do. She moved to the beginning of the black marks and took four steps back. Parked, she thought. Took off from a dead stop. She studied a dark spot in the drying pavement. Squatting, she ran her finger over it. The dark coloring clung to her fingertip and she sniffed it. Cigarette ashes. Her eyes shifted to the patch of grass where a cigarette butt lay.

  Dani turned to see if her uncle was watching. Not surprisingly, he was chatting up Nancy Ferguson. The curvy redhead was on her way to Red Riot’s Waffle Barn to start her morning shift. As married as Otis was, he wasn’t one to pass up a flirtatious exchange with a member of the fairer sex, especially one who bounced as much as Nancy Ferguson.

  Dani hurried toward the cigarette butt. She reached in her pocket, pulled out a reserve of tissues she always kept on hand, and dropped them on top of the cigarette with the intention of scooping up the evidence discreetly. She was interrupted by the hard-throttle sound of a motorcycle approaching.

  She didn’t have to look to know who it was. There was only one asshole in Baptist Flats who drove something that loud and obnoxious. She placed her foot over the thin pile of tissues.

  The bike pulled to a stop and CJ Bollin twisted the throttle a couple of times before he let his beast idle down. When he was done showing his ass, he cut the bike off.

  “CJ,” Dani said with a look of disdain.

  The rider let a broad smile spread across his bearded face as he peered over his mirrored sunglasses. “Still playing cops and robbers, I see.”

  She ignored his dig. “You’re gonna have to turn your bike down Bean Street. Got a crime scene on Woodchester.”

  He looked down the road. “Well, ain’t Baptist Flats getting all big city with its crime scenes and all.”

  “You got business with me, CJ?”

  He turned to her. “Just stopped to tell you that you look sexy in your police costume.”

  “It ain’t a costume, it’s a uniform.”

  “Don’t care what it is. I just know it would look extra good crumpled up on my bedroom floor.”

  “You best be moving along now.”

  “You get any more tattoos…”

  “CJ, I will pull my gun out and shoot you, so help me…”

  “I got something in my pants I can pull out and shoot you with, too.”

  Dani made an effort to keep her foot on the pile of tissues and cigarette butt. “Damn it, CJ, move on out of here. Now!”

  He laughed. “Hold on. I’ll be on my way, no need to get all bunched up on me.” He turned the key in the ignition. “But damn, girl, you should know not a day goes by that I don’t think about that trail of stars that runs across your hips and down to your fun area.” He hooted and grinned. “Where that trail ends is just about my favorite spot in the world.” With that, he kicked the bike to life and raced down Woodchester, gathering up pieces of Daryl Cartwright on his tires as he went.

  Sheriff Royal threw up his hands and turned to Dani. The deputy acknowledged her uncle’s admonishing glare with a tilt of her head and a small shrug of her shoulders. Lucky for her, Nancy Ferguson was testing the laws of indecency and the strength of the fabric that made up her Red Riot’s T-shirt. The sheriff’s attention was quickly re-affixed to the sight of the waitress’s unnaturally sized nipples looking like two bottle caps struggling to bust free from their cotton prison.

  Dani bent down, grabbed the tissues and cigarette butt, and stuffed them in her pocket. It occurred to her that she might be removing valuable evidence from a crime scene, but she was tired of being a slight girl living a tiny life in a small shit town in Tennessee. She just needed something to do that was even halfway different than what she did every other day. Solving a double homicide was just her way of giving herself a life. Besides, she was a cop. Solving crimes was what she was supposed to do.

  Chapter 4

  Kenny sat with his feet propped up on the metal desk and tinkered with the bill of his cap. He had spent the morning rubbing oil into the fabric, trying to capture the perfect grimy aesthetic. A Hardee’s coffee cup half-filled with brown spittle occasionally drew his hands away from his bill-bending duties as he added to its contents with streams of tobacco-stained saliva. Step leaned a chair against the wall of the wood-paneled office and worked on his eighth post-lunch cigarette.

  The two killers were as different as a cyst and a cancerous tumor. Kenny was a simple man in search of a complex thought, and Step was a complicated soul desperate to rid himself of the splinters of decency that he just couldn’t pluck. They came at their jobs from two different, but equally tragic, backgrounds. Kenny was born into misfortune while Step had run into a buzz saw of bad luck late in life. Whatever their paths had been to arrive at doing closeouts for a living, they did them, and they never left a job undone. They weren’t always discreet, and they didn’t always go by the hit man handbook, but they always left their targets dead. They worked well together. Kenny was the only person who made Step smile, and Step was the only person Kenny made smile. Everybody else wanted to punch Kenny within two minutes of meeting him. They were as different as could be, but somehow they made sense as partners. It was almost like God brought them together to do the devil’s work.

  “So I’ve been thinking on that fella-on-fella business we talked about,” Kenny said after spitting into his cup.

  Step gave him a lopsided scowl with his cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

  “Some fellas do the butt sex from the front. You know, like missionaries do.”

  “So?”

  “A hairy back don’t come into play then. And while we’re at it, a fella can have regular sex with a woman from behind.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I’m just all turned around on your butt sex theory, that’s all.”

  Step took a deep drag from his cigarette, held the smoke for a beat, and then forced it out the left side of this mouth. “Why in the hell are you so worried about it?”

  Kenny shrugged. “I ain’t worried, exactly. I’m just curious. I just like to know how things come together, you know.”

  “Look,” Step said, wiping a speck of sleep out of the corner of his eye, “there’s no ‘wheres’ and ‘what-fors’ when it comes to fucking of any kind. Some fellas like big asses, some fellas like little asses. Same goes with hairy backs and tits and balls. The nature of a person just grabs on to a thing and says, ‘That there cranks me up. I think I’ll have sex with it.’ You see what I’m saying?”

  Kenny ran his finger across the stitching on the bill of his cap. “I suppose.” He hesitated and then said, “What do you like about Bones?”

  Step flicked some ashes on the concrete floor. “For one thing, she don’t ask a lot of fool questions like some people.”

  It took a few moments before Kenny figured out he’d been insulted. “Well excuse me for having a brain.”

  “Being fixated on asses and the like don’t mean you’ve got brains.”

  “You never know where my inquiries could lead to, Step. That’s the way curiosity works. One day, I’m asking about peculiar sexual druthers and the next day I’m discovering a link between ass size and butthole cancer.”

  Step let loose a mucus-coated laugh. “You’ve got a wonky connection in your head, boy. You’re just plain not right.” He thumped his skull with his middle finger for emphasis.

  “We’ll see who’s laughing when I’m receiving a nobility prize for my inquisitive ways.”

  “There ain’t no such thing as a ‘nobility prize,’ dumbass.”

  Kenny paused mid-bend of the bill and raised an eyebrow. “I think yo
u’re wrong about that, Step…”

  Laurence “Boss” Perry entered the office of his auto repair shop and stood with his hands in his pockets. His face was settled into a stony frown. He was a severe, sturdy man who had little time for bullshit, and his morning had been filled with nothing else, so far.

  Boss was first-generation, self-made vicious. He was born into a good God-fearing family that had ripped at the seams when the old man’s auto repair shop went belly-up. Liquor and pills pushed God out of the family’s lives, and led young Perry into a life of petty crime. In a relatively short period, he’d put enough money in his pocket to buy a gun that he used to kill the man who’d stolen his father’s auto repair shop out from under him. Eventually, he earned enough blood money to take the deed on the property and give the shop back to his old man. But by then, his father had annihilated his liver with drink. He died less than a month after being back in operation; Boss kept the place as a cover for his burgeoning criminal career.

  The expression on Boss’s face now was no different than any other day, but Kenny recognized that it was masking an even darker mood. He immediately forgot about his hat and frantically removed his feet from Boss’s desk. He woofed out a groan when he managed to knock his cup of spit to the floor.

  Boss clenched his back teeth, causing his jaw muscles to ripple.

  “Sorry, Boss,” Kenny said, falling to his knees and damming the flow of brown saliva with his hand. “I’ll get it cleaned up quick as a cat.”

  Step bit his cheek to hold back a laugh.

  Boss cleared his throat and pursed his lips as he worked to steady his nerves. “That’s about all you’re good for, ain’t it?”

  Kenny looked up. “Boss?”

  “Making a mess. You’re a goddamned genius at fucking up.”

  Step couldn’t contain his laughter anymore, and it came out as a nasally grunt.

  Boss pointed at him. “Don’t you dare fucking laugh, boy. You’re deep in it, too.”