Midnight Grinding

by Ronald Kelly

  The Highway Patrol was out in full force, as were the FBI, but the increase in law enforcement did not seem to deter the Butcher from performing his fiendish whims. It got so that veteran travelers of the road began to carry pistols and sawed-off shotguns, secretly stashed in glove compartments and sleeper cabs. Most of the truckstops began to sell a rather popular bumper sticker which read “YEA, THOUGH I DRIVE ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH, I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, FOR I AM THE MEANEST S.O.B. ON I-53!” However, at least a couple of those fearless motorists were found lying across their front seats with their throats cut down to the neckbone or their entrails dangling from the rearview mirror like strands of Christmas garland.

  The sudden increase in freeway paranoia did not help Mark Casey’s situation any. He had been a drifter for years, possessing a nagging desire for wandering and the freedom of the open road. Before the chaos on I-53, the long hair and beard had not hampered his ability to catch a ride, either from one exit to the next, or straight through to his intended destination. But these days, hitchhiking was becoming one big pain in the ass. Whenever he hung out at a truckstop or stood at the roadside with his thumb in the air, he felt the eyes of potential rides appraising him negatively and noticing his uncanny resemblance to Charles Manson. Never mind that the wild eyes and swastika carved on the forehead was absent; the motorist would still see all that hair and the baggy field jacket that could easily conceal any number of sharp implements. They would see all that in one fleeting glance, shake their heads “fat chance,” and drive on, leaving Mark frustrated, sore-footed, and cold.

  If it hadn’t been for his sudden pairing with Clifford Lee Gates, Mark was sure he would have ended up walking clear from Florida to Ohio that week in mid-December. Clifford Lee was a lanky boy of eighteen from Cloverfield, Georgia, a farming community that boasted a gas station, a general store, and a whopping census of one hundred and eighty-two citizens. Clifford Lee had high aspirations of becoming a country music singer. His constantly good-natured grin and overabundance of optimism were signs that he actually believed that he would make it big in Nashville, armed only with a beat-up Fender acoustic and his rural charm, despite his obvious lack of money and connections. Mark knew at once, upon meeting him at a greasy spoon called Lou’s Place, that he should watch out for this wide-eyed innocent. The boy would be easy pickings with a psychopath like the Butcher on the loose.

  Anyway, it was Clifford Lee’s infectious charm that netted them a ride north with an overweight copier salesman by the name of A.J. Rudman. Rudman was returning home to Louisville from a Xerox convention held in Daytona Beach the previous week. They had overheard him talking to the truckstop waitress and, when he was paying his check at the register, Clifford Lee approached him with a big ole’ country-bumpkin grin. The middle-aged salesman was apprehensive at first, eyeing the young man’s bearded friend with immediate suspicion. But soon, the boy’s benevolence won over the man’s worries and he told them he would give them a lift that stormy winter night.

  The long drive started out in silence, a silence born of tension and uneasiness. Mark sat in the front, while Clifford Lee took the backseat, upon Rudman’s insistence. Obviously, the Kentucky salesman wanted the more suspicious of the two where he could keep an eye on him.

  Mark suffered the blatant mistrust quietly, just thankful that he and the Georgia farmboy were inside a warm, dry car and not humping the dark countryside in the pouring rain.

  By the time they crossed the Tennessee state line, the mood had lightened somewhat. Idle conversation had echoed between the three and Clifford had even picked some country tunes on his guitar. The hillbilly twang in Gates’ voice grated on Mark’s nerves, but he settled into the Lincoln’s plush velour seat and tried to enjoy it anyway. A.J. Rudman seemed to be having digestive problems. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other tucked into the mid-section of his tan raincoat over his prominent beer belly. Probably has a bad peptic ulcer, thought Mark, not without a flare of mean-spirited satisfaction. I guess that’s what you get when you’re a part of the corporate rat race these days, right, Pops?

  “Where are you boys bound for?” Rudman asked out of pure boredom. His nervousness seemed to be gradually increasing for some reason. He was popping Rolaids like they were jelly beans.

  “Well, I’m heading for Dayton,” Mark replied, trying to inject a friendly tone in hopes of dispelling the man’s distrust in him. “I’m going home to my parents’ place for Christmas. Mom always has a big spread laid out: turkey, candied yams, the works.”

  “How about you, son?” the salesman asked over his shoulder.

  Clifford Lee had been softly singing a medley of Dwight Yoakam songs. He looked up and grinned sheepishly. “I’m off to Nashville, Tennessee, to be a big country star. I grew up on country and western music. Me and my pa, we’d listen to the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night. I got to singing and picking on the guitar here and the folks said ‘Why, you’re as good as any of ’em, Clifford Lee! You oughta head on up to Music City and try your luck.’ So that’s what I aim to do.”

  During the farmboy’s longwinded explanation, Mark noticed his hand squeeze past the guitar strings and disappear into the hole of the Fender’s hourglass body. He grinned. Surely Clifford Lee didn’t have a secret stash hidden inside his guitar. Mark had been around enough potheads to know a few who hid their grass in strange places, including musical instruments. But, no, Clifford Lee Gates was no more a smoker of marijuana than Jesse Jackson was the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Still, the thought of a good smoke, straight or otherwise, brought out that craving for nicotine in Mark Casey. Since Rudman seemed to be a smoker himself, Mark absently reached into an inside pocket of his olive drab coat for a pack of Marlboros, figuring the guy wouldn’t mind if he indulged. Suddenly, the big Lincoln Continental was whipping back and forth across the double lanes of the northbound stretch of I-53, shooting onto the paved shoulder on the far side and braking to such a sharp and screeching halt that the bearded hitchhiker would have butted his head against the windshield if his seatbelt hadn’t been buckled.

  A breathless silence hung within the car for a long moment. The pattering of steady rainfall on the roof was the only sound to be heard. Then Mark turned and regarded the pale-faced businessman. “What the hell did you do that for?” he yelled. “Are you trying to kill us or something?”

  A.J. Rudman swallowed dryly, his right hand still pressed against his gastric woes. “What were you doing?“ he croaked back. “What were you reaching for…inside your coat?”

  “My smokes, man, that’s all!” Mark pulled the cigarettes from his pocket and slammed them down on the dashboard. He stared at the businessman incredulously. “You thought I was going for a knife, didn’t you? You thought that I was the freaking Roadside Butcher! That I was gonna pull a big knife outta my coat and carve your sonofabitching head clean off. That’s exactly what you thought, wasn’t it?” He snorted and shook his head in disgust. “Well, I ain’t the damned Butcher…you got that? I may look like some drug-crazed devil worshiper to you, but I’m just a regular guy trying to get from point A to B and, believe it or not, I’m just as jumpy as you are where that butchering crazy is concerned.”

  “Well, I thought…” began Rudman in embarrassment. “It’s just that you reached into your pocket without any warning and…”

  “Yeah…yeah, I know, man. Just a big misunderstanding. Why don’t you just loosen up and put us back on the road again, okay?”

  The salesman nodded. He was about to shift back into drive, when Clifford Lee chuckled from the backseat. “Shucks, Mr. Rudman, ol’ Mark ain’t the killer. Shoot fire, he’s one of the nicest fellas I’ve ever met,” he said with a grin. “Heck, naw, he ain’t the Roadside Butcher. But, you want to know something kinda funny? I am!” And, with that, the farmboy reached around the padded headrest and laid a pearl-handled straight razor against A.J. Rudman’s flabby throat.

  “What are you doin
g, man?” Mark asked. He looked at the goofy Georgian with the cowlicked crop of reddish blond hair and the slightly bucked teeth. Suddenly, as he stared into that freckled face, he realized that what he had initially interpreted as down-home naiveté had actually been a dark, underlying madness all along.

  “What do you think I’m a-doing?” giggled Clifford Lee. The honed edge of the shaving razor glinted sinisterly in the pale glow of the dashboard light. “I’m fixing to kill this nice gentleman. Now, don’t go looking so danged surprised, Mark. And don’t worry…I ain’t gonna hurt you none. You’re my friend.”

  Mark Casey watched in numb disbelief as Clifford Lee made his victim shut off the engine, unbuckle his seat belt and, ever so carefully, climb out into the stormy night. As if in a trance, Mark left the car also, walking around the rear bumper to watch the inevitable bloodletting. Clifford had Rudman’s head pulled back by the hair, the straight razor positioned at a deadly angle above the man’s carotid artery.

  “But why, man?” asked Mark, his stomach sinking at the dread of having to stand there and watch a crimson gorge open beneath Rudman’s double chin. “Why are you doing this?”

  Clifford Lee Gates gave his roadmate a toothy grin and shrugged. “Why not?”

  Then something very strange happened. Something that neither Mark nor Clifford anticipated. A.J. Rudman still had his hand tucked inside his raincoat. It had been there all during the tedious transition from dry car to wet pavement. Mark had just figured the poor guy’s ulcer was about to explode. But he saw now that hadn’t been the case.

  Rudman slowly withdrew his hand and—clutched in his pudgy fingers—was the biggest damned Bowie knife that Mark Casey had ever seen in his life.

  He didn’t know exactly why he did it, but he yelled “Look out, Clifford!” The razor-wielding musician leaped back just as Rudman turned and slashed in a broad arc that would have taken out most of the boy’s abdomen if he had been standing in the same spot. The twelve-inch blade sliced through the cold misty air with a loud swoosh.

  Rudman laughed. “The Butcher, like hell! You’re nothing but a damned copycat… and not a very good one at that. Oh, slitting throats is just fine and dandy, but it shows a great lack of creativity.” The middle-aged salesman passed the heavy knife teasingly from one hand to the other. “Come on, farmboy, let me show you how I express myself.”

  Mark could only stand and watch as the two men squared off in the twin beams of the Lincoln’s headlights. The guitar-picker stood poised and ready, the joint of the razor’s blade and handle gripped between thumb and forefinger. The salesman crouched in a classic fighter’s stance, the big Bowie held, long and perfectly balanced, in one chubby hand. Like a couple of duelists, they circled one another, appraising strengths and weaknesses, then came together in a violent fury of flashing steel and spurting blood.

  Mark knew he should have run for his life, but he was transfixed. Grunts of pain and the ripping of clothing and flesh echoed across the empty lanes of Interstate 53. The frightened hitchhiker witnessed the awful blood feud, torn between revulsion and fascination. He rooted for neither man, although one had been a newfound friend until only a few moments ago.

  The fight ended abruptly when the two men struggled to the pavement and rolled toward the front of the car, away from Mark’s view. A torturous scream split the air, followed by a wet gurgle. For a moment, the headlights revealed only the glistening pavement ahead and the driving rainfall. Then a single form stood up.

  “I won,” grinned Clifford Lee.

  Mark backed away as the young man started around the car for him. Clifford’s denim jacket was in bloody tatters, his face criss-crossed with deep gashes. He had traded his razor in for the broad-bladed Bowie. “You know when I said I wouldn’t hurt you, Mark?” asked Clifford Lee, brushing aside of flap of loose skin that hung above his left eye. “Well, hell, I lied. I’m sorry, buddy, but I’m gonna have to kill you, too. Can’t leave no loose ends, you know. Hope you understand.”

  But Mark didn’t understand. He leaped off the road and into the darkness. With a maniacal cackle, Clifford Lee was in hot pursuit. Unfortunately, there was no solid ground beyond the glow of the car’s high beams, only a steep drop-off into a wooded hollow below. The two tumbled head over heels, landing at the bottom of the grassy incline. Mark was the first one up and that was to his advantage. Clifford Lee was groggy from bashing his head against a rock on the way down. He crawled toward his lost blade, but didn’t quite make it. Mark reached the big knife first and, without a second’s hesitation, drove it between his traveling buddy’s heaving shoulder blades.

  “What’d you do that for?” croaked Clifford Lee, blood spraying from his mouth and nostrils. “I thought we were pals.”

  “I thought so, too,” replied Mark. “God help me, I really did.” He withdrew the knife and buried it to the hilt one more time, just to be on the safe side.

  Moments later, Mark was climbing back up the grassy face of the hollow for the interstate. His wild high of exhilaration and relief faded into confusion when he reached the lip of the thoroughfare. A dark form crouched beside the bloody body of A.J. Rudman, then stood and shucked a revolver from a side holster when he saw Mark stumble out of the darkness.

  “Killed him…” Mark managed, trying to explain, pointing back into the hollow. “I killed him…stabbed him…”

  The state trooper lifted his .357 magnum in a two-handed hold. “You just stop right there,” he barked. “Drop it and don’t move a muscle.”

  Mark couldn’t understand why the lawman refused to listen. “The Butcher…” he gasped. “Dead…I killed the…”

  “I said, drop the knife! This is my last warning!”

  “But you don’t understand…” Mark sputtered. He lifted his hands to reason with the man and there it was, the Bowie knife, completely forgotten until it flashed electric blue in the patrol car’s cascading lights.

  Three shots rang out. Three hollowpoint slugs obliterated the top of Mark Casey’s skull and sent his body sprawling across the white borderline of the median. Clumps of brain and splinters of skull littered the dark pavement, but they were soon washed away as the black rains of the storm soaked Interstate 53 and scrubbed it clean.

  Officer Hal Olsen holstered his revolver and walked back to the patrol car. He sat down heavily and picked up the mike of his radio. “Unit H-108 to headquarters. Send me additional back-up, will you? I’ve got one hell of a mess out here on I-53, two miles north of the Monteagle exit. I’ve just shot the Roadside Butcher, but not before he killed two others.” When he was assured that help was on its way, the officer replaced the mike and turned his radio off.

  He sat and stared at the body lying there in Army fatigue jacket and faded jeans. Shaking his head, he withdrew an object wrapped in canvas from beneath his car seat and walked over to where Mark Casey lay.

  “I don’t know who you were, fella, but you just got me off the hook.”

  Officer Olsen withdrew a long-bladed machete from the wrapping and hefted its comforting weight in his hand one last time, before tossing it as far as he could into the wet darkness of the backwoods hollow. Then he returned to the car and waited for his fellow officers to arrive.

  THE WEB OF

  LA SANGUINAIRE

  Spiders are another type of critter I’m not particularly fond of. The South is crawling with them. Black widows, brown recluses—we call them “fiddlebacks”—and we even have an aggressive “jumping” spider that will literally chase you.

  I hear tell there is a nasty breed of spider that frequents the dark swamps of Louisiana…one that the Cajun folk speak of in hushed and fearful tones. An eight-legged monstrosity known as “La Sanguinaire.”

  Larousse would not take him there at first. “It not safe to travel de swamp at night,” the old Cajun warned in his heavy French accent.

  But Douglas Scott Price was accustomed to having his own way. An extra hundred dollars laid across the old man’s leathery palm soon change
d his tune.

  The last rays of daylight played through the Spanish moss hanging from ancient cypress trees when the two climbed into Henri Larousse’s pirogue, a canoe-like boat used by many of the trappers and fishermen in the area. “What’s that for?” Price asked his guide when a double-barreled shotgun was laid across the center seat.

  The elderly man shrugged. “De gators, dey would rather eat than sleep. Where we are going, dey be plenty of dem.”

  They began their long journey into the Louisiana bayou in silence. Price sat at the bow of the boat as Larousse rowed. Deeper into the swamp they drifted and deeper did the shadows gather, until the Coleman lantern next to the scattergun had to be lit. It cast an orange glow upon the two men. The lack of conversation was awkward, but they really had nothing to talk about. The only link between them was purely monetary.

  A loon screamed off in the darkness, causing the young man to jump. The elder man chuckled softly and continued to row with slow, even strokes.

  “So, what is it you do for a living?” the Cajun asked. Without conscious thought, he maneuvered the dugout across the dark waters, missing exposed roots and sandbars by mere inches.

  “Oh, nothing really,” Price replied with an air of pomposity. “I was born into old family money. Ever heard of the New England Prices? No? Well, I expected as much. Being independently wealthy tends to mean a lot of free time, but I manage to keep myself busy.”

  Larousse had a good idea what sort of luxuries occupied Doug Price’s time. Ferraris, eighty-foot yachts, and million-dollar thoroughbreds; a wet bar always at hand and a beautiful woman waiting at every point of the compass. Larousse knew his mind as well as he knew his own. Men of wealth and influence…you could almost smell the good fortune exude from them like the odor of some cheap cologne. The Cajun had been born in backwater poverty and had lived that meager life for nearly eighty years. He could sense a rich man a mile away, like a bluetick hound catching the scent of swamp coon upon a midnight breeze.