by Bryan Smith
And then he had it.
He let out a breath.
Shit.
After making Harley heel, he aimed the flashlight’s beam right at the man’s face and said, “You’re Stump’s boy, right? Calvin, ain’t it?”
The young man grimaced as he sucked in a breath between clenched teeth. Then he glared at Luke. “Yes. I’m Emma’s sister.”
So he was the brother of one of the dead girls. It made sense. Luke figured most folks had let go of their outrage in the years since the trial. It was just the way life worked. People got wrapped up in the drama of a big thing like that, but public indignation over a supposed injustice had a short shelf-life. The furor died down and the general populace moved on with their lives. But it didn’t work like that with family. Luke knew that well enough. He was still clinging tight to decades-old grudges of his own. With family, you don’t ever forget, especially when it comes to murder.
Luke shook his head. “So what was the plan, Calvin? Kill my dogs, break into my trailer…and then what?”
A corner of Calvin’s mouth twitched, his eyes burning with defiance in the glare of the flashlight’s beam. “Was gonna slit your throat and watch you bleed out like a pig.”
Harley growled at the more aggressive tone, prompting Luke to gently nudge one of his hindquarters with the toe of a shoe. “Easy, boy.” The dog ceased growling and looked up at him, tongue lolling out as he panted. “Calvin, I didn’t k ill your sister. Didn’t kill any of those girls.”
That same corner of the kid’s mouth twitched again. “Bullshit.”
“It’s the stone truth, boy. I don’t know who killed Emma or any of the others, but it wasn’t me.”
The kid grimaced as his hands went to the wound in his side again. “You’re a liar.”
Luke moved closer and knelt beside him. He set the flashlight on the ground, but kept the .357 clutched in his right hand. “Let’s get a look at this. Lift up your shirt.”
“Get away from me.”
Luke sighed. “Kid, if I was gonna kill you, I would’ve done it by now. Now lift up the damn shirt.”
Calvin’s expression remained mistrustful, but he complied with Luke’s request, the pain from the wound evidently overwhelming his righteous fury. He was wearing a flannel shirt over a white T-shirt. His blood-stained fingers shook as he worked at the buttons of the flannel shirt. Once it was open, he tugged up the T-shirt, and Luke leaned closer for a better look.
The bullet had carved a pretty nasty groove along the side of his ribcage. Luke didn’t doubt it hurt like a bitch, but the kid had been lucky as hell. The bullet hadn’t actually entered his body. If it had, the little asshole might be dead already. “All right, let your shirt down.”
Calvin winced as he took his own look at the wound. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit, man.”
“Relax. You’re gonna live.” Luke snatched up the flashlight, stood up, and moved back a few steps. “Come on, now, get up.”
The kid braced his hands on the ground and tried to push himself up, but his face contorted at a fresh surge of agony and he fell back against the tree. Harley shifted on the ground next to Luke, looking up at him with anxious eyes. The look was one that always got to him. It was the dog’s way of asking him if everything was okay. That was one thing people who weren’t dog people didn’t get. They were actually expressive as hell and had many ways of communicating their feelings. Harley looked and acted like a tough critter, but he and Jasper were more like the kids he’d never had than actual guard dogs. He’d acquired the two of them from the same litter shortly after his acquittal, raising them from puppies. In the wake of his post-acquittal estrangement from damn near everyone he’d ever known, they were practically the only family he had left.
The train of thought effectively killed any sympathy he might have started feeling for Calvin Wilhoite. “Tell me something, kid. What kind of cowardly, sick piece of shit poisons animals?”
Keeping his back against the tree for support, Calvin again tried to get to his feet. This time he was more successful. Once he was upright, he fixed Luke with a sneering glare and said, “You ain’t got no right to talk, South County Madman.”
Luke pointed the .357 at him.
Calvin’s eyes went wide as he sucked in a breath and began to tremble. He extended a shaking hand. “No. No. Please…”
Luke couldn’t help feeling a primal satisfaction at seeing the fear in the boy’s eyes. For years now, he’d lived in the long shadow of that murdering asshole, wrongfully branded with the faceless, mysterious killer’s hateful nickname. The South County Madman, aka the middle Tennessee boogeyman. As far as many were concerned, he was the South County Madman, regardless of what the jury had decided. There had never been a shred of physical evidence linking him to the crimes. Other than the fact that all five bodies had been dumped in the woods adjacent to his property, there had been no evidence of any kind against him. But that hadn’t mattered to the citizenry, who were scared shitless and wanted desperately to feel safe again. So the law went looking for a scapegoat and found a convenient one in Luke Benson. From the beginning, his court-appointed lawyer told him the slipshod case the prosecution had put together would fall apart at the trial level. No self-respecting jury would ever convict on such flimsy evidence in a capital case. Even so, until the verdict was read, Luke remained convinced he had a rendezvous with the electric chair.
After all he had endured, it felt good—albeit in a deeply bitter way—to get some mileage out of his unjustly earned reputation. “What’s the matter, boy? You look like you’re about to piss your pants.”
Fresh tears spilled down Calvin’s trembling face. “Please…”
Luke lowered the gun. “Calm down, kid, I ain’t—“
His next words died in his throat as Calvin propelled himself away from the tree. The lunge happened too fast for Luke to dodge it, but instinct caused him to bring the gun up again, its barrel digging into the kid’s abdomen as he slammed into him. His finger squeezing the trigger was pure reflex. It was the last thing he wanted to happen, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. The gun went off as their entangled bodies began a descent to the ground.
Luke cried out in pain as his back hit the rocky forest floor and the kid’s dead weight settled atop him. A sense of helpless, bitter horror engulfed him as the irreversible grim reality of what had happened hit him. Another Wilhoite kid was dead and yet again he would be taking the blame. This time he’d actually done the deed, albeit by accident. But no one else would ever see it that way. The court of public opinion would decree Calvin Wilhoite the latest victim of the evil South County Madman. And this time there would be no calm, rational evaluation of the facts leading to another reprieve. He would be railroaded for sure. Hell, considering how high the blood-fever was likely to run amongst the locals, he might not even make it to trial alive this time. An assassination or a staged “suicide” in a holding cell seemed not just possible, but probable.
Harley was going crazy, yapping his head off and dancing around the bodies prone on the ground. His barking had taken on that shrill, frantic quality again. Back at the trailer, Jasper was actually howling, his anxiety over what was happening out in the woods driving him crazy. Luke pictured him straining against his lead so hard he was nearly choking himself. Coupled with the reports of the gun, it was a lot of noise.
Things were usually dead silent out here this time of night. Fortunately, though, there was little chance anyone would hear the ruckus, much less alert the local law over it. Luke had been a loner much of his life. Even before the bodies of dead girls started showing up around his property, he’d had few close friends, a fact that had cemented the public’s image of him as a creepy killer. Guys like that were always loners. But it was his lack of interest in the company of other human beings that had prompted him to acquire this isolated patch of land right on the southernmost tip of Rutherford County. The property’s location set it inside the county but outside the city limits of Murfrees
boro, the nearest town. His trailer was so remote, in fact, that there was no trash pickup and no mail delivery. He had to burn his own garbage and journey to town once a week to pick up any mail that had accumulated at his P.O. box. These things were mildly inconvenient, but Luke enjoyed the solitude. He had never liked other people much, anyway, seeing most of them as duplicitous, backstabbing assholes only out for themselves.
In the end, though, the isolation worked against him, setting up the circumstances that transformed him from being a typical loner—the kind of guy hardly anyone ever gave a second thought—into an outright social pariah. According to Luke’s lawyer, it was common for serial killers to dump their victims in remote wilderness locations. It was just his bad luck that this particular killer had chosen the area right around his trailer as his preferred site for corpse disposal. He understood the logic of this, but a more paranoid part of him wondered if there was something more than just bad luck involved. What if he was being specifically targeted by someone who wanted to pin the blame on him for mysterious reasons? Though the lawyer had assured him this possibility was unlikely, he wasn’t able to utterly dismiss it.
Though immediate discovery of what had happened here was unlikely, Luke was anxious to calm his dogs and put an end to the noise. He wouldn’t be able to think properly about what to do next until that happened.
So he rolled the corpse off him, sat up, and heaved a big breath. Harley was on him in an instant, slobbering all over him and licking his face incessantly with his sandy tongue. Luke endured the anxious canine attention with quiet stoicism for a few moments, happy that the dog had at least stopped barking. And though Jasper was still barking intermittently, he was no longer howling, another relief. Harley began to calm down after getting his neck scratched some and receiving many whispered reassurances that everything was okay. Everything was not okay, but for now he needed his boys to think it was.
Luke got creakily to his feet and stared down at the dead boy, his face twisting in an expression of disgust. He hadn’t been any older than eighteen or nineteen. Too young to die, Luke thought. And too stupid to live.
He felt sad for the kid and for the loss of his abruptly terminated life. Felt bad for his parents, even that mean old Stump. But these feelings were short-lived, giving way to a fury that surprised him. He was an innocent fucking man. A jury of his goddamn peers had affirmed this. Was it so much to ask that he finally be allowed to put the painful past behind him? All he wanted anymore was to be left alone.
And to have some fucking peace, goddammit.
The force of what he was feeling could not be contained. It had to go outward. He let out a screech of rage and started kicking at the dead boy’s body, driving the toe of his shoe into his wounded side again and again. Unused to seeing his owner so enraged, Harley started whining. It was the sound of the dog’s distress that eventually brought Luke back to earth, shame displacing his fading anger. He stood there bent over for a few moments, breathing heavily with his hands braced on his knees.
He stood there and stared at the body a few moments longer, his brain abuzz with too many half-formed thoughts and ideas, none of which showed any promise of slowing down and coalescing into something coherent. A temporary change of scenery was needed. He turned away from the body and started back toward his trailer, whistling at Harley to follow him, which he did after a final sniff at the corpse.
Jasper went a little haywire when he saw them emerge from the woods, yelping and jumping at the end of his lead. Despite his manic behavior, the dog was clearly relieved to see his owner and canine buddy again. Luke gave him a little extra attention for a minute, then unclipped the dog from his lead and beckoned for both of them to follow him into the trailer. It would be some time before he would feel safe leaving them outside again. Hell, they might even become permanent indoor residents. They could just as easily alert him to the presence of intruders from in there.
Back in the trailer, he snapped on the lights and grabbed a cold can of Old Milwaukee from the fridge. He took a long swallow from it, heaved a sigh, and sat in a folding chair at the little card table in the tiny kitchen. His dogs plopped down on the linoleum floor and looked up at him with big grins. He smiled at them and felt his eyes water as he thought of how close he had come to losing at least one of them.
The noise in his head began to recede as he sat there and drank more of his beer. The front section of yesterday morning’s Tennessean newspaper soon drew his attention. Anxious to distract himself from the crisis at hand—even if just for a few moments—he drew it close and read that day’s big story, which was more about the Iran-Contra mess. Reagan’s boys had screwed the pooch big time on that one. He hadn’t had a chance to get down to town to pick up today’s paper, but he knew it would just be more of the same. He didn’t actually give a shit one way or the other. The top guys on both sides of the political aisle were always out to screw the little guy, regardless of their stated intentions. This was a point of view he’d inherited from his asshole father. Even now, long after their violent falling out, Luke still thought this was a remarkably sensible way of looking at things.
But reading the story did its job. By the time he pushed the paper away and finished off his beer, he was a lot calmer and was thinking much more clearly. He saw only one way out of the predicament Stump Wilhoite’s idiot son had created for him. It meant becoming for real the bad guy everybody thought he was. It was a bitter thing, a very hard thing to accept, but there was no way around it, not if he meant to resume some semblance of his normal life. And he did, by God, he did.
After tossing the empty beer can in the trash, he went to the closet in his bedroom and retrieved the box of ammo for the .357 he kept on the top shelf. With the dogs following him from room to room, he carried the box into the kitchen and filled the gun’s empty chambers with fresh slugs. He shoved a few extras into his jeans before returning the box to the closet. While in there, he grabbed a pair of winter gloves. He hadn’t imagined he’d be donning them again for months to come, but they were necessary for his purposes tonight. That done, he cleaned Calvin’s blood off his torso, put on a shirt, grabbed everything he needed, and departed after giving his boys a final affectionate nuzzle behind the ears.
There was a little creek about ten minutes into the woods. Dragging the body along with him, Luke followed the stream of peacefully trickling water down to a narrow dirt access road primarily used by hunters. That was where he found Calvin’s Ford pickup. Huffing and puffing from the exertion, he got the dead kid’s body loaded into the back. An examination of his wallet gave him his home address, which luckily was in a part of town Luke knew well. He could get there easily enough. A further search of Calvin’s pockets turned up his keys, which was a damn good thing. If the kid had dropped them out there in the woods, Luke’s plan would have been dead on arrival.
After covering the body with a dirty plastic tarp, he slid in behind the wheel of the truck and jammed the key in the ignition slot. He had a bad moment where it seemed like the engine wasn’t going to turn over, but then it did finally sputter to life. Some kind of heavy metal noise issued from the truck’s tinny speakers. Luke didn’t recognize it. The only rock and roll he liked was from his own youth in the sixties. The Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Hendrix, etc. Even Jimi’s famous six-string histrionics had been very different from all this modern-day screaming and yelling over guitars that sounded like they were being tortured. He was more of a Hank Williams and Merle Haggard kind of guy these days, anyway. After silencing the radio, he got the truck turned around and started toward town.
The access road was a couple of long, curving miles of bumpy, rock-strewn dirt. Luke had to go slow and keep the high beams on to avoid collisions with trees. The narrow road eventually petered out and fed into a stretch of two-lane blacktop. From there it was a mostly uneventful eight mile ride to the outskirts of Murfreesboro. At about the midway point of the journey there was one briefly tense moment when a patrol car from the she
riff’s department went speeding past him in the opposite direction. Luke glanced at the rearview mirror and gulped as he saw the cruiser’s brake lights come on. He had been sure the cruiser would turn around and come after him, even though he was observing the speed limit. It was a late hour in a small town and hardly anyone was out driving around. The lawmen around these parts had a deserved reputation for stopping people for no reason other than sheer boredom.
But the brake lights winked out again after a ball-shriveling couple seconds, and the cruiser kept heading away from him. This came as a massive relief to Luke, whose gloved right hand had been curled around the grip of his .357 during those seconds. He let go of the gun and listened to the heavy thumping of his heart, wondering how it would have gone down if the sheriff’s deputy had come after him. He saw only two realistic scenarios. Either he would have taken his own life or he would have been forced to kill the deputy. Both possibilities were equally appalling. He didn’t want to die and he had no desire to risk a gunfight with a cop. The only other possibility would have been arrest and he had already decided against letting that happen. Hell, it was the whole reason he’d embarked upon this crazy course of action.
A few miles after passing a sign welcoming visitors to Murfreesboro, he took a left at Compton Road, experiencing another brief period of uneasiness as he continued down past the VA hospital, where he’d spent some time after his return from Vietnam in 1972. The building was the site of some deeply unpleasant memories, and he didn’t fully appreciate how tense its proximity made him until he had to forcibly unclench his teeth.
But then the facility was behind him and he was fully focused on the present again. Ten minutes later he took a right at Church Street and shortly thereafter found himself in the heart of Murfreesboro. He was jittery and his nerves kept yelling at him to go faster and get this over with, but he kept a lid on his fear and mostly stuck to the posted speed limits. Occasionally he went a little faster than that, especially on side streets, where the posted limits were often absurdly low. The key here was in not doing anything to arouse the suspicion of any law enforcement types. Yeah, speeding was a bad idea, but if you went too slow in certain areas you could get mistaken for an overly cautious drunk driver.
