Of Blood and Water: Campground Murders (Virgil McLendon Thrillers Book 1)

by catt dahman

  They were tidy as well, which David required. Only once did Lucy leave a spill on the kitchen counter, and David, proud of himself, explained to her it was unacceptable but didn’t back hand her. In time, he knew he would, if she needed it, but somehow, he didn’t think she would mind too much since her eyes went shiny and she licked her lips when she thought he was about to hit her.

  There was a scratching at the door, and Lucy walked in; she was poor with boundaries.

  “Tonight was exciting, wasn’t it?”

  David pulled a face. “I was kind of bored, really. There wasn’t an enemy, and there were no spoils of war.”

  “No girls, you mean.”

  “Yes, I didn’t get off on little boys, like some of the guys did.”

  “What about older girls? Women?”

  “I like women,” David said.

  Lucy had stripped off her soiled garments and was in a sheer violet nightgown that fell to her ankles and was cut in a deep V that showed off her décolletage. She smelled nice like David’s mother, kind of. She ran a finger from his collarbone to his bare stomach, inspecting his muscles and nodding with approval.

  “What’re you doing?” David asked.

  “Playing?”

  “You came here with Stan and Ronnie. I don’t think it would be a good thing for us to fool around when you’re with one…or both of them. It would cause problems.”

  Lucy wasn’t pretty, but her hair was freshly washed and still damp, and she gave off heat as she chewed her bottom lip. “I gave Ronnie some for a fair trade. He did me a favor, and I did him a warm, soft favor,” she said, almost purring.

  “Once?”

  “Just once because that was all I needed was one favor. And Stan…a few times just because I was bored and wanted something to do. The thing is Stan doesn’t really like girls or women. Yanno, what I mean? Pretending I was a boy and doing it his way…not very fun.”

  David swallowed hard.

  “Yeah. Stan likes boys.”

  Lucy’s breasts filled the nightgown and almost spilled out in doughy pillows; her pudgy belly strained the fabric, and she had to hold her stomach in to keep from bursting the thin fabric. But her damp hair, the scent, and the way she watched David with sleepy-looking eyes interested him. He breathed harder.

  Lucy stepped closer until their bodies touched and then leaned into him. She felt good.

  David forgot everything else and pressed closer.

  They didn’t sleep until the morning sun peeked through the drapes and lit the room softly. As they fell unconscious not far away, a little boy named Mike awakened to find a nightmare within his tent.

  Lucy smiled in her sleep.

  She knew the boys thought she was lying about her age because they periodically made little jokes about it and teased her sometimes, but they always said she was older than she pretended to be. She said she was eighteen. The truth was she was lying about her age, but not in the way they thought.

  She was fifteen.

  She had always been a larger girl and looked a couple of years older than she was, and when she hit puberty, she looked a lot older. Of course, the men at truck stops and parks who hired her for a half hour didn’t care how old she was; they just wanted to pay, sigh, and go.

  Meeting Ronnie and Stan at a convenience store was a stroke of luck. They struck up a conversation at once and got along perfectly, so she naturally fell into company with them to travel.

  Something niggled at her mind though and caused nightmares; it was something she couldn’t let go of. She told Ronnie and Stan why she left her home, leaving out the part about her age for fear they would be less friendly or open to her being with them.

  Her step dad and mother were worthless pieces of trash, drunks who were so disgusting that they frequently slept in their own vomit or pee after a drunken, drug-fueled bender. Both were reed-thin because they never ate properly, never cleaned the house, and barely worked only to sell drugs.

  The house was a mysterious maze of old newspapers and mail stacked ceiling high, dirty and clean clothing in piles, bags of rotting trash, plates fuzzy with mold, and rubbish from yard sales that Lucy’s mother dragged in for some reason. Periodically, Lucy found dead, mashed rats beneath trash stacks.

  And bugs.

  Bugs everywhere. Spiders crept around in the dark, and there were swarms of flies, pesky biting fleas from the damned rats, and huge cockroaches. Lucy would have walked on hot coals rather than go into the kitchen at night and face the hordes of roaches. Sometimes the bugs crawled over her feet while she was sleeping, and she woke, screaming.

  The house needed a good cleaning, and her mother and stepfather needed the same, as well as a good drug and alcohol program, but all of that was not forthcoming, and Lucy couldn’t make it happen. She had no sanctuary; at school, she was the girl with dirty clothing that always had a bad smell about her, who looked older than her years, and was whispered about.

  Because she had bad parents and was poor, somehow the boys figured she was easy. Maybe she was, but the clumsy fumbling in the backseats of cars was the only warm human contact she ever got. She wasn’t easy. She was available.

  Lucy had no peaceful refuge, and because she had to assign blame, she placed it right where it belonged: on her mother and stepfather. Granted, all her grades were failing, and she had no close friends or other family and no reason to stay in her situation, but the fact that she was there to begin with and had to made a drastic change irritated her.

  She wasn’t overly bright, but going out alone on the road was dangerous, and there was a price to pay: her body. Which wasn’t that big of a deal except that she resented that it was the fault of someone else. Had she been the cause of her situation, then that would have been somehow fairer.

  Her nightmares were of enormous cockroaches stalking her through endlessly large kitchens, their little legs, as big as thin twigs, caressing her neck. Often, she awoke, screaming with terror. She wanted the roaches to go away.

  After having been on the road a few weeks that might have been months, she wasn’t sure, and all the places and men ran together in an endless collage of thoughts. Lucy, however, felt she knew how to make the nightmares go away. The problem was that she wasn’t near the house and she didn’t know how to handle the work, herself; she thought maybe it was because of her lack of imagination, but Ronnie and Stan came through like the true friends they were.

  She did pay Ronnie in a way he enjoyed. Stan was just excited to have been asked to come up with a plan and was fixated on the details. Lucy, for her part, lay in the back of the van and napped as the boys crept down the street and did their job. She refused to set foot in that nasty house.

  It was an hour before they returned, awakening her as Stan sped off from the scene.

  “They were both drunk and sloppy, and they were high. They let us in to use the phone when we said we had a broken down car. It was like you said; I swear the stench made my eyes water,” Stan said. “I’ve never seen such a mess before with the rotting food and roach shit.”

  “Told you,” Lucy said, “and then what happened?”

  “They were easy to tie up. Your mom was a real loon, begging and whining, so I knocked her teeth out with my hammer. She bled like a pig and whined more, but, of course, she had a reason, yanno.”

  Lucy grinned.

  “Then, I did what we planned, and I broke her joints. I took my hammer and whacked each joint against the floor; three blows each so I made sure the bones were smashed. She passed out a few times, but I got her good…ankles, knees, fingers, hands, and feet. I have to say that of all that smashing, the hands woke her up the most, which was interesting,” Stan said.

  “Finger by finger? You got those hands that never did a thing but slap me and hold a cigarette? Bitch.”

  “Finger by finger. Started with the pinky,” Stan explained.

  “Your stepdad just sat there, too stoned to care, but he came alive when I went to cutting on him. Bastard cried li
ke a baby. I did tell him what a shit he was with his dirty house and drunken, slobbery ass, and I told him you sent regards. Now, that woke him up as well. He looked mighty shocked,” Ronnie said.

  Lucy made an amused sound.

  Ronnie shrugged, “They went on and on about why, why, why. So I told them why. I told them you were our family now and they had screwed up and made you miserable. I told them I was repaying them for their bad ways. You’d think after asking why so much that they’d be glad to know or something, but they just looked like they couldn’t comprehend it all.”

  Lucy nodded, “Maybe the pain….”

  “Maybe, but it was certainly irritating when they demanded to know why we were doing it; then, we told them, and they just stared and acted befuzzled. I swear that was stupid.”

  “We took our time, as you asked. They suffered. I’m so sorry you had to live in that place with those idiots, Lucy. And I got you some stuff from your room like you asked,” Stan told her.

  Lucy felt a strange fondness for both boys, something she was unaccustomed to feeling. It had been years since anything such as caring or friendship had been in her life, but she felt a sort of love, a family-like love. “I love you guys. You’re the best friends on earth, and I ain’t never gonna let you go,” Lucy told them. They had killed brutally for her, to avenge her honor. It was a downright, tear-jerker-kind of event, and Lucy felt a little misty eyed.

  “Well, Lucy, I love you, too. You’re family, girl,” Stan said. He meant it. She was like the unwanted pup of a litter that he felt compassion for.

  “Eh, Lucy, we’re always here for you.”

  “We’re the three mousekateers,” Lucy said.

  “Musketeers.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’ll explain later, okay?” Stan asked.

  “Okay. Then what happened?”

  “Well, they were both fairly out of it but alive, so we started a fire right next to them so that they would burn and not suffocate. They were terrified with their big ole eyes, and they tried to scream, but your mom couldn’t move with her busted joints. We made sure they were burning before we ran, but that place is gonna go up big time,” Ronnie said. “It’ll go to the ground really fast.”

  Lucy sighed, “Good. All the bugs and rats can burn up, too. Finally, that place will be clean.” She felt her body relax for the first time in years. The bugs would fry and become crispy, and all of them would die right in that nasty house and be cleansed from the earth because the only way to be really clean and to really have absolution was by the hot licking of flames.

  “You boys are the best.”

  For the first time that night, Lucy slept dreamlessly, sleeping deeply and peacefully. Stan wondered just for a second about the fact that Lucy’s face was unlined and that she looked years younger, almost pretty. The bugs were gone; her anger was still burning brightly, but at least she felt clean.

  Now, she slept next to David.

  Chapter Five: Camp

  Mike awoke well rested while one of the older boys played revelry on his bugle. “I slept like the dead; how about you?” His bladder felt about ready to pop because it was so painfully full, but before he could think past sitting up, he noticed a bad smell, like dog poop, copper pennies, and something else sour and bad, all put together.

  Erby’s and Charlie’s beds were empty, and the covers were thrown to the wooden floor; he saw all of that clearly by the sunlight that poured through the back of the tent from the huge floor-to-almost-ceiling cut; the canvas flapped a little in the slight breeze. Mike struggled to understand why a giant hole was in his tent. How strange. Had a tree torn it loose? What caused such a thing? He’d figure it out later.

  He looked at Jerry’s bed, and his jaw dropped open with shock. If the hole in the tent were confusing, this certainly wasn’t. It was as clear as could be: a sheet covered Jerry up to his neck, but the sheet was torn and ripped in several places and drenched with red and blackish-red blood, and it was drying stiffly in spots. There were dozens of stab wounds.

  The amount of blood covering Jerry, along with his wide-opened, terrified eyes, attested to the pain and fear he had felt as he died. His mouth was partially open, his lips were grey, and he was really, really dead. Mike’s legs felt watery, and his head buzzed uncomfortably, but it was his bladder that reacted first. He peed all over himself as he started to scream.

  Erby’s father, Mr. Lowry, was one of the first to run into the tent, and as he grabbed his mouth while he looked around and searched for his son, he asked, “Where’s Erby? Where is he, Mike?”

  Mike shook his head.

  Mr. Lowery searched under the bunks, yanked away covers, and looked around, inside and out, everywhere possible.

  Don, one of the scout masters clutched Mike close, hugging him and checking him for injuries, and although Mike was twelve and a big kid, he clutched Don gratefully, feeling safer. He heard Mr. Lowery thundering questions at him and saw him waving his arms, but he didn’t know the answers or care about anything except that Jerry was dead.

  Mike had slept while Jerry was killed.

  MIke leaned over and vomited.

  Mr. Lowery glowered and asked, “Where is my son? I want to know where Erby is. Mike, answer me right now. Did you and he sneak out? Where did you go? Where is Erby?”

  “Give Mike a few minutes. He’s scared to death,” Don said. He led Mike out of the tent and helped him sit down, calling for some orange juice so Mike could wash away the taste of vomit; he took a blanket and covered the boy who shivered in the morning air.

  Other scouts stood around, trying to see what had happened and asking questions, but the scout leaders tried to keep everyone back. Someone raced away to call for the sheriff.

  “Don’t touch anything, Lowery.”

  “I wanna know where my boy is.”

  “We didn’t go anywhere, Mr. Lowery. We went right to sleep, early, and I didn’t wake up ‘till I heard the bugle. So I don’t know where Erby and Charlie are or what...what…ha…happened to Je...Je…Jerry.”

  Mike stared at the counselor with fury.

  “Let the sheriff handle it. If you touch things, you’ll ruin clues. Damn, look at Jerry. Who would do that? Why? What the hell is going on?” Don looked at the cut in the tent. “They went in here. I guess they took Charlie and Erby since they aren’t here, so that’s hopeful, Lowery.”

  Lowery ran hands through his thinning hair and paced, avoiding the blood, piss, and vomit. “Is Mike okay?”

  “Mild shock, I think. The nurse is on the way. Mike doesn’t know anything, Lowery. We’ll find Erby. Hang on.”

  It was about thirty minutes before the sheriff and his deputies showed up.

  “Get these people the hell outta here unless they have something to tell me,” was the first thing Sheriff Jess Harding yelled. He waved at the scouts who were watching, along with campers who joined the crowd.

  “Jeez, someone tore that kid up,” Tobias said as he looked at Jerry. He motioned to the photographer. “Get me shots from all angles. Climb around, but don’t move the body. I want every angle. The sheriff will want them.” He was pale and shaking with nervous anxiety as he gave orders. How could a parent live with a child being killed this way? He would lose his mind if someone hurt his family.

  “Whoever it was took the weapon,” Tina Rant reported, “but there is one partially, smudged footprint, but there’s only a toe left in the blood.” She gulped. “So I don’t think that we can get much from it.”

  “Mr. Lowery, we need you to step outside, and let us do our job.”

  “We have some crazy killer up here, and he got one of the kids already, sheriff. My son is gone, and that boy in there is cut all to hell.”

  “I realize that, but that boy also has parents who love him and want whoever did this caught and soundly electrified, so you let us do our job and get information. We have to walk and talk it and find the monster that did this.”

  “We have to look for
Erby and Charlie before that sex manic does terrible things and we lose two more boys, my boy,” Lowery said.

  The sheriff tilted his head, “Sex maniac? We got a pervert here, Lowery?”

  “Well, what do you think when whoever it was cut that poor boy’s privates to shreds and stabbed him mostly there. That’s a sex pervert-thing.”

  “Don’t go announcing that. We don’t know anything yet,” Sheriff Harding said. “I know you’re upset, but try to calm down and be part of helping, not hindering.”

  Tina Rant patted him absently as she pushed him out of the tent. “Let’s find out where we need to look,” she huffed. “I guess they could have awakened and run away or they could be scared and hiding, but I would think they’d be out of hiding and calling for help by now.”

  “So whoever came in here killed Jerry, stole two of the boys, and left Mike sleeping soundly. Kidnapped the boys.”

  “If more than one did this, then they could have hurt or killed Mike. They made a choice here. They took those boys for some reason,” one deputy said.

  “Them? They? More than one?” Harding asked.

  “I think so, Sheriff?”

  The sheriff listened as his deputies talked, debating theories, and he was about to warn them against saying the boys were kidnapped since they had no evidence to support that, but for now, he let them talk. None of it made sense anyway to him: for one boy to be killed so brutally, one left untouched, and two were missing.

  “Yep, Virgil, there had to be at least two. Hey, get several pictures of that fabric in the kid’s mouth. It’s one of the few things we got,” Sheriff Harding yelled, “unless, maybe it wasn’t an outside killing team.”

  Virgil frowned and said, “Wasn’t outside? Why that would mean, Sheriff, you don’t think….”