by Jake Hinkson
-CHAPTER FOURTEEN-
Audrey
Thickroot stood and picked up his gun. He jerked his head toward the back of the house, and the girl followed him. The dog followed the girl. "We'll be just a minute," he told me.
I shook my head. Think, damn it. He knows your name. What does that mean? You didn't say it, right? You made a crack about your name being Juan.
What are they in there talking about?
You didn't use your name did you?
Stan could have called him and told him you were coming. But why did Thickroot give you the third degree when you showed up? Was he just being careful? Or—
When Thickroot & Daughter walked back into the room something had changed between them. The girl ducked her head, hands shoved in her pockets, shotgun tucked under her arm, and stalked to the front door. The dog loped after her. At the door, she turned around.
Thickroot carried his shotgun like a caveman clutching a club. He stopped at the doorway of the kitchen and barked at his sullen child. "You just gonna stand there with your thumb up your ass?" he asked.
The dog barked back at him.
The girl glanced at me. Then she turned, opened the door and stomped outside, the dog following.
"Goddamn cunt," Thickroot muttered. He jerked his head at the door and told me, "Sorry about that, man. She's stubborn. But we got you all set up. Let's go." Before he started for the door, he glanced back at the television screen. After a brief interlude of plot, the porn had gone back to a sex scene.
I stood up. My nerves jangled with indecision. He waited for me. I walked past him.
Outside, he told me, "Three's going to ride with you. I'll follow."
The girl stood by the driver's side of the Armada and waited.
"Really?" I said.
Thickroot shrugged that off. "She's an old pro at this. Been doing it since she was a kid."
I looked back at the girl. Her short brown hair drew to a point on her forehead, just above her pissed-off expression. I suppose if I'd been bulldozing garbage and corpses all my life, I'd be pissed off, too.
"Sure," I told Thickroot.
Thickroot stared at me for a moment.
I asked, "Is there anything else?"
"Nope," he said.
I put my hand out to shake. A weird smile twisted onto his face, and he put his meaty paw out. We shook, and I walked down to the Armada.
"Make more sense to let me drive it," the girl said. She had a low voice for a girl.
"Sure," I said. I threw her the keys, and she caught them with one hand. I walked around to the passenger side and got in while she opened the back door for the dog. Panting, the dog struggled into the backseat.
The girl climbed in the driver's seat and fired up the SUV. She backed out, and I watched her father watch us. He stood there a moment, scratched his gut, and carried his shotgun down to the orange van.
Three tore off into the woods. After only a minute, I couldn't tell if we were still on a road. I didn't see Thickroot following us.
The kid and the dog both stunk like all hell. I thought about rolling down the window, but there was no point. It smelled worse outside.
The girl sat up close to the wheel. Sweat beaded her forehead and chin.
After a moment of silence, the dog shoved her head between our seats. I rubbed behind her ears. "What's your dog's name?"
The girl sucked in her lower lip. "Audrey," she answered finally. "Arnold thinks her name is Bitch. That's what he calls her; the name he give her. But her real name's Audrey. That's the name I give her."
"Audrey's better than Bitch, I'd have to say."
The girl lit a cigarette and the vehicle soon filled with smoke. It was an improvement on the smell. "She's a good dog," the girl said. "Follows my ass everywhere, like that little blue dog in the Dagwood cartoons."
"Daisy."
"Yeah. Like Daisy." She stuck the cigarette in her mouth and let it dangle while she rubbed the dog's dirty little head. In a soft voice, she said, "Old Audrey's gonna have puppies pretty soon."
I nodded. We bounced over a hill and reconnected to something resembling a path.
"Where we're going's pretty far out," Three explained. "Obvious reasons for that."
"Sure," I said.
The third quad differed from the first two. When I'd driven through the first two parts of the landfill, everything lay spread out in a grid, with sections of trash on each side. This third part, however, was a contorted piece of country. The hollows dug deeper and a dark river of trash coursed down into them. We followed the path of this river until we seemed to be driving down into the trash; it rose above us on either side, hills of it. Soon the natural landscape surrendered, and I saw the last of the treetops clawing at the night sky before we descended completely into the canyon of garbage. Fat trash bags, stray bottles, diapers, wrappers, rotting food, shattered glass, fragments of furniture—all of it stacked seventy, eighty, ninety feet high. The mounds of sludge and waste dipped and rose like the curving of a mountain range.
Our path narrowed and twisted like a single kinky strand of fabric, and Three slowed down. I checked behind us, but I didn't see Thickroot.
"Your dad must be far back there."
She took the cigarette out of her mouth. "Yeah. Must be."
"I notice you call him Arnold."
The girl took a final drag from her cigarette, lowered the power window, and flicked it into the wind. "It's his name."
"And yours."
"I didn't ask for it."
"No one ever does. You're the third. Did you know your grandpa?"
"Yeah," she said. "He was a good one, I guess, but he didn't know what the hell was going on most of the time." Her eyes glanced at me and then went back to the road. "But who does?"
"Yeah. Do you get along with your father?"
"You talk a lot," the girl said, not impatiently but as a statement of fact.
"I guess. I used to be a preacher. Got paid to talk."
"No kidding, a preacher?"
"Yeah."
"I never knew a preacher before. What's a preacher do besides talk on Sunday?"
"Visit people. Old folks, families with problems. I did a lot of work with troubled youth."
She pressed closer against the steering wheel, her thick arms hugging it close. "I'm a youth with troubles."
I looked down at my hands. "I know."
"How do you know?"
"Well," I said. "I mean, doing this kind of thing." I motioned to the back of the SUV. It seemed like the bodies were starting to stink, but I couldn't tell. The whole damn world stunk at that point.
"What kind of thing?"
"Dumping bodies," I said. "I imagine it must bother you."
The girl dug out another cigarette from the pack in her shirt pocket. She lit it and said, "It don't bother me. I done worse."
The macho bluster. I'd seen it in Stan, seen it in DB, seen in a hundred pimply faces over the years. Hell, I'd seen it in myself. And what was it? Nothing but a magic trick, a sleight of hand: Watch this hand, and my pain and fear just disappear. Magic. Thickroot had raised Three to be a fucked-up boy, and, in some ways, that's exactly what she reminded me of.
"It would bother me," I said.
The girl chuckled. "I don't know why," she said. She wagged her thumb over her shoulder. "You brung these ones here with you."
"They're not mine."
Three laughed at that.
"Tell it to the cops," she said.
"I guess you have a point," I said. "Still, I don't know what kind of—and, I don't mean anything by this, but I just ... I don't know what kind of man makes his daughter do this kind of thing. Makes me feel bad to be here."
Three said, "Well, Arnold's a piece of shit. Thing I can't figure is how Old Number One produced such a son. That don't hardly make sense. Old Number One wasn't perfect, mind you. He ruint hisself on booze till he finally drunk hisself into the ground. But he was always more harm to hisself than anybo
dy else. Arnold, though. He's meaner'n a dump rat."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
The girl stared at the road, but even from the side I could tell she had something in her eyes which her father simply lacked. She might be poorly educated and ill-raised, but she had a natural thoughtfulness. "What would you a-told me when you was a preacher? I mean, if I had come to you and said what I just said?"
"I would have offered to help you."
Hugging the wheel, she sucked on her lip and watched the headlights claw the corridor of trash.
I said, "I can offer to help you now."
"How?"
"You don't have to stay here. You can leave. I could help you leave."
"Sure you could. I bet you're real fucking touched by my predicament."
"I've dealt with lots of kids with bad parents. More than you know. I know it's tough, but it's not a destiny. You can still be your own person."
"You're right about that. You think I want to stay in this shithole my whole life?"
"No, I don't."
She leaned back a bit and shot me an incredulous look. "How are you going to come in here and offer to help me? You don't even know me, man."
"You know what, Three? Nobody knows anybody. It's all guesswork. I look at you and I see a kid raised in a stinking dump with a no-good father. Am I wrong?"
"No, that's pretty spot on."
"All I'm saying is, you still have a choice. He hasn't got that part of you deep down inside of you, that part you've hidden from him, that part you've protected from him. That part is still yours. You can still hold on to it."
She smiled.
"What?" I said.
"You was a preacher, huh?"
I chuckled. "Yeah. I guess my preacher gene flares up every now and then. But I'm serious, Three. If you're in trouble, I do want to help you."
She glanced at me and then back to the path coiling deeper into the trash mounds. "You're the one in trouble."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing."
"Three, what do you mean?" I looked behind us. Still nothing.
The kid shook her head. "Nothing. I should keep my mouth shut."
"You meant something by that. Where's your father? I don't see his van."
"He's coming." She hugged the steering wheel again. "You don't know what's going on here, do you?"
"Maybe not. Why don't you tell me?"
"What do you think?"
"Well, right now I'm thinking Stan called your father."
"Arnold."
"Arnold. Stan called Arnold. He told him I was coming. Told him who I was. Told him to get rid of me."
The girl slowed down.
"Well?" I said. I looked behind us again.
We crawled to a stop. Garbage towered above us on each side.
Audrey stuck her head between us. Three rubbed her ears.
"That's pretty much the situation," Three said.
"Jesus," I muttered. I looked behind us.
"He ain't back there," the girl said.
"Where is he?"
Still rubbing Audrey's ears, Three jerked her chin ahead of us. "Section sixteen."
"What's supposed to happen there?"
The girl shrugged like I was asking her what had happened at school that day. "We're supposed to get rid of you."
I stared at her.
"We done this sort of thing before," she said. "While you was up at the house with Arnold, I come out here and bulldozed up a hole. We're supposed to shoot you, throw you in the hole, cover it up and then push a bunch of trash on top."
I thought about the way Thickroot had sized me up back at the house. He had been sniffing around to see if there was some extra money. When I'd made it clear I was just running errands for Stan, he'd decided to just go ahead and kill me.
"Now what, Three?"
She opened her door, cradled her shotgun and stepped out. "C'mon, Audrey," she said gently. The dog climbed onto the driver's seat, and the girl scooped her up and set her on the ground. She pointed down the road and told me, "Keep going right. It'll lead you back to the main road."
I climbed over to the driver's seat.
"Wait," I said. "Felicia ..."
"What?"
"Do you know what Stan was going to do with Felicia?"
"I don't know," the girl muttered. "I don't know nothing about nobody named Felicia. Arnold didn't mention nothing about a woman."
"Why are you helping me?" I asked.
The girl squinted down the path ahead of her. "'Cause you're the only one ever offered to help me," she said. She turned and spit into the trash. "But you can't help me, though. It's blood on blood, this thing between me and him. It's been coming at me my whole life. I always knowed it, too. I guess it's gotta come to a head tonight. I hadn't figured it that way, but I reckon that's the way it's shaking out." Audrey nuzzled her leg, and Three scratched her head.
I stared at her. "Thanks," I said finally.
She thought about that, rubbed the dog's head some more, and shrugged.
* * *
I had no idea where the hell I was, had no idea what contortions the path would take, but I sped away as quickly as I could.
I didn't get far before I had to stop.
I sat there and thought—or tried to think anyway.
As a couple of huge rats scurried through the headlights, something gnawed at me. I wanted to get out of this shitty hole in the earth as soon as I could. I had to get back to Felicia.
Either she was with Stan in setting me up or she was in worse trouble than me. Either way made sense, if you looked at it objectively. She might be with him. She might have been with him from the start. Maybe I'd been brought in at the last moment to be a fall guy. That would make sense.
But the other way was possible, too. Stan had murdered two people, one of whom was a police officer. Now, he'd tried to eliminate me as a witness. He could easily do the same to Felicia—maybe have this Fuller guy kill her. If so, I had to move fast if I was going to protect her.
But I sat there with the SUV idling.
Looking back over my shoulder, back down that dark path twisting through the mountains of trash, I couldn't see anything. I thought of that girl on her way to a confrontation with her father.
I dropped the phone and ran. Out my office door, down the hall, down the steps. Tree limbs bent in the wind and leaves slapped at a sky drained of color. My car was parked in my usual space.
I jerked the wheel to the right, pulled up until the grill kissed the trash mounds, then I backed up. After a couple of tries, I'd turned around completely.
I headed back toward Section 16, back toward Three and Audrey and Arnold Thickroot Jr.
-CHAPTER FIFTEEN-
Section 16
I heard them before I saw them. I'd parked beside a tin marker with the number 16 on it and climbed out of the SUV, starting down the path on foot, figuring it must lead to a clearing of some kind. A thin wisp of cloud drifted across the moon like cigarette smoke and gave everything below a milky-blue tint. I fumbled along as quietly as I could, looking at the trash pile for a weapon of some kind but all I found was an old-fashioned Coke glass bottle with the heavy bottom. I clutched the neck of the bottle like a billy club and crept down the path not knowing quite what I would do when I got there. I didn't know what Three had planned, but I didn't want to leave her to it alone. That much I was decided upon.
I hadn't gone far when I heard Thickroot's voice. I couldn't make out what he was saying, but it sounded indignant. I hurried closer, and as I rounded the mound of garbage I saw the light from his truck pointing away from me.
After the turn around the trash pile, the road I was on dropped so sharply that I was looking down on them. Thickroot's truck, sitting beside a bulldozer, pointed at a hole in the dirt a few yards ahead, its high beams shining down into what was supposed to be my grave.
Thickroot, clutching his shotgun, stood beside his truck. His daughter stood further away, mostly obs
cured in the darkness with Audrey somewhere behind her.
Thickroot slapped the hood of his truck.
"You're a fucking sight to see," he told his daughter. "You're a fucking sight to see. Walking up here with that mangy dog and a stupid ass look on your face."
The girl said something I didn't hear.
Thickroot waved it away.
The girl said something else, and Thickroot causally pointed his shotgun at the sky and fired once. At the boom I jumped and dropped my bottle, but neither of them heard me. I picked up the bottle as the echo of Thickroot's shotgun whispered past me.
I moved closer to them in the dark.
"What am I supposed to tell Stan?" Thickroot asked his daughter.
As I got closer, I could begin to make out Three in the moonlight. She stood with her weight on one leg, the shotgun tucked under her arm.
She said, "Tell him the guy never showed up."
Thickroot rubbed his chin. "I could tell him that."
"Or," the girl said, "tell him you don't want to kill people and bury bodies no more."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that."
Thickroot spat in the dirt. "You're so tough, why don't you fucking tell him?" He spat again. "Little cocksucker. Maybe I should let you explain to him why you let the fucking guy go."
"I'll tell him," the girl said.
"I know," his father scoffed. "You got such balls now. You want to talk to him, you go right ahead."
I stopped at the bottom of the hill and crouched behind some fat plastic trash bags with damp, shredded paper sticking out the ends like soppy white tongues.
"I can't hardly believe you're my father," the girl said.
"Well, that makes two of us," Thickroot said.
Three nodded. "I reckon." Audrey stood beside her staring at Thickroot with contempt.
The father said, "You just let him go?"
"Yep," his daughter answered.
"Just like that? You just let him go?"
The girl didn't answer. She didn't like to waste words. She'd said what she'd said, and she didn't see any use repeating it.
Her father slapped the hood of the truck again, walked to the edge of the grave and kicked a plastic cup into it. Slowly, he turned around and looked at his daughter.
