The Borrowed World Series | Book 8 | Blood & Banjos

by Horton, Franklin

  Sharon looked doubtful. “You really think she’s going to listen to reason? It didn’t work the first time. Why would it work now?”

  Lloyd spoke slowly, choosing his words with utmost caution. “No, I don’t think she’ll listen. She’s made that abundantly clear.”

  “Then what do you expect to do? You just going to waltz in there and tell her you killed her son? Tell her it should be a warning to her to leave us the hell alone?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then what?” Sharon demanded. As soon as the words left her mouth, realization dawned on her and she began to understand. She suddenly knew exactly what Lloyd was planning. She raised both hands to her face, cradling it, mouth open in shock.

  “I’d rather not talk about it, Sharon. I’ve never done anything like this before, but I don’t see any choice. In the year I lived with Jim and his people, I saw this time and time again. Some people can’t be reasoned with. The only way you stop them is to kill them. What do you think she’ll do next? Burn this house down with you and the children in it? Murder one of the children to avenge her son’s death?”

  “I couldn’t live with that,” Sharon said, lowering her hands from her face.

  “I know you couldn’t and I couldn’t either. That’s the only reason I’m willing to do it. This isn’t why I came here. This is what I came here to escape. Yet here I am.” Lloyd was staring at the ground, his voice hollow and emotionless.

  It was only then that Sharon understood how difficult this was for Lloyd. She’d seen Jim’s willingness to settle the matter with violence, but Lloyd had been the pacifist of the pair, the voice of reason. He’d imagined the camp would be a respite from the violence of the outside world, yet he’d walked into more of the very thing he was trying to escape. She couldn’t help but feel guilty about that. Through no fault of their own, they’d put him in this place. This was not his fight but it was something he was willing to do for them. It was a sacrifice.

  “When are you going?”

  “I need to go now. She’ll be waiting. And I understand if you want me to keep riding and not come back here. If you don’t want me around the children, I get it.”

  She saw the sincerity in his eyes, the acceptance that this thing he was about to do might make her banish him from their insular world. That wasn’t what she wanted at all. They needed him as much as he needed them. “We want you back here. Be safe.”

  Lloyd nodded, lost in his thoughts, processing what lay before him. He left the room, his heavy shoes loud on the wooden floors, echoing through the quiet house. Sharon was still sitting in Oliver’s room when she heard the back door close.

  “Thank you for hiding us, Oliver,” she whispered. “Thank you for pushing the world away.”

  63

  Bland County

  Lloyd mounted his horse carrying only his weapons. He didn’t want to raise any questions so he didn’t ride past Kendall’s house, instead cutting through the cornfield and taking a direct cross-country route toward Kimberly’s trailer. He knew some of the land he crossed was Oliver’s. At some point he likely crossed onto other people’s land, but trespassing was the least of his concerns.

  He intersected the paved road after twenty minutes of riding, turning left and accelerating to a gallop. His mind was laser-focused on the task ahead of him. He wasn’t wary of the homes he passed, nor the people observing from the shaded recesses of their covered porches. He ignored those laboring in their fields or searching for stray vegetables among the browning jungles of their gardens. His mind only had room for one thing and that was the act of violence he imagined lay ahead of him. It expanded to fill all the space within him.

  When he neared Kimberly’s home, Lloyd steered his horse off the road and onto an overgrown patch of vacant land. He hopped off the horse and led it deep enough into the underbrush that it was concealed from the road. He tied it out with a short length of rope and confirmed that his shotgun had a round chambered.

  Lloyd figured he was still a half-mile from Kimberly’s place but wanted to stop early enough that she wouldn’t hear the sound of his horse on the pavement. The place he’d stopped was typical of overgrown farms in this part of the country. High grass clumped together in dense knots. Briars, wild roses, and raspberry bushes tore at him from all directions. Virginia Creeper encircled and choked the older trees, the leaves forming a thick carpet along the bark. Rabbits and groundhogs had cut trails through the field, evidence of their daily travels. Rotting fenceposts sagged earthward, only held aloft by a tether of rusting barbed wire.

  Lloyd jogged through the high grass, aware that this was probably the most he’d run in a long time. He tried not to think ahead. Tried not to think about what he had to do. He didn’t slow until he saw the chimney from the old sharecropper house on Kimberly’s property. He took cover behind a dense ornamental bush gone wild from neglect.

  Shifting his body and shading his eyes, he spotted the trailer. Kimberly sat on the porch smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. Lloyd couldn’t smell it at this distance but figured it was more likely to be pot than tobacco. Lloyd knew she was waiting for the son who would never return and the hostage who’d never arrive. Though Kimberly didn’t know it yet, her opportunity was lost. The farm would never be hers.

  He was afraid to approach from the front or the side. If she saw him, she might retreat into the house. She’d either lock the door, which would make everything more difficult, or she’d retrieve a weapon and fight back. He didn’t want that either. A protracted gunfight might bring curious neighbors. Lloyd crept toward the back of the property, wading his way through more briars, pokeberries, and high grass.

  He soon found himself in a graveyard of agricultural castoffs. There were old horse-drawn machines that more industrious people might have put to use. Other pieces of equipment were more modern, but still over a half-century old. There was an Oliver tractor on four rotted tires and with only a hint of its original green showing through the patina of rust. A broken-down John Deere track loader sat with old sheets of roofing tin covering its exposed engine, the farmer who last turned a wrench on it long dead and gone.

  An ancient Dodge flatbed glowered forlornly from a barn. While the barn may have originally provided some shelter to the truck, the vehicle was now the sole means of support for the collapsing structure. It was a symbiotic relationship, the fallen roof laying across the vehicle like a blanket stretched across a sleeping dog. Lloyd ran up on a blacksnake and they startled each other, both recoiling from the other like mirror images. Lloyd kicked at the snake and it slithered off beneath the back porch of the old tarpaper house.

  Lloyd eased around the corner and approached the mobile home from behind. The back porch was as bad as the front. A filthy rug hung over the railing, having laid there so long it was decomposing from the sunlight. There were bags of trash piled in the corner, gnawed open by animals and disintegrating from the elements.

  He crept up the steps, taking them slowly to avoid noise. They’d once been painted red but it peeled away in fist-sized shards now, revealing the rotten wood beneath. Once he was on the porch Lloyd found an aluminum storm door missing both the glass and screen panels. It was simply a frame with a latch, left in place as if the mere inference of a door might somehow confuse the insects and keep them from going inside.

  After studying the situation for a moment, Lloyd ducked his head and stepped through the empty frame. The space in which he found himself was between the living room and kitchen areas of an old and neglected mobile home. The carpet was crimson and the air smelled of mildew. The walls were dark paneling, the curtains made of mismatched bath towels. The sofa was stained and disgusting in a way that made Lloyd feel as if taking a seat on a razor blade would be preferable to settling onto that couch.

  The front door was open and there was no screen door there. Lloyd raised the shotgun and pressed the black button mounted near the trigger guard. There was a tiny click. Lloyd kept moving. He heard Kimberly humming some tune
he didn’t know. It sounded like country. When he spotted a bare shoulder, he side-stepped in the dark interior of the house until she was fully visible to him. He aimed the shotgun at the back of her head.

  She somehow sensed his presence. Perhaps it was smell, intuition, or some instinctual revenant from the more animalistic regions of the brain. She suddenly twisted her head around, as if she’d caught movement in her peripheral vision. She’d already turned back to the road, dismissing the sensation, before it hit her that she’d actually seen someone there in the recesses of her home. She twisted again, so hard this time that she fell out of her chair and lay before Lloyd, staring up at him with confused anger.

  He stared back. She was missing most of her teeth but had her tongue pierced, likely some drunken impulse intended to make her seem cooler. Her arms and legs were covered in bad tattoos. They looked like notes written in ballpoint pen and left out in the rain, the lines bloated and washed out.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Lloyd focused on his breathing. He didn’t want his voice to telegraph his fear. “I was here the other day with those friends of Oliver’s. They tried to persuade you to leave well enough alone, but you didn’t listen.”

  “That place should have been mine. It ain’t right. It’s still going to be mine. You watch and see.”

  “You talking about your son? The one you sent to kidnap a child from the camp?”

  Kimberly looked surprised at that. Surprised he knew. Her smug expression faded with the realization of what that meant. “He get caught?”

  “He got killed.”

  She unleashed a scream and tried to get to her feet. Lloyd squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the trigger. There was a boom and the sound of choking. Lloyd opened his eyes, aware that he might just screw this up if he couldn’t see what he was doing. He wished he hadn’t. Kimberly was sagged back against the deck rail, one leg fully-extended, the other bent beneath her. Her eyes were wide open and a choking sound burbled from the missing lower half of her face.

  Lloyd tried to shoot again but he’d failed to rack the slide. He hastily corrected that and pulled the trigger again. The shot punched a hole in the center of her chest. She arched backward and the rotted deck rail broke behind her. She tumbled to the ground, hitting like a sack of feed dropped off a loading dock. Lloyd stepped to the edge and peered over at her. She was a bloody mess he wanted no part of, but he understood he couldn’t leave her there.

  Without a body, they could deny any knowledge of what had happened to Kimberly and her son. If the pair turned up dead, though, there’d be questions. Even if his actions were justifiable because of the kidnapped child, his willingness to resort to violence might lose them support in the community. He didn’t want to take that chance.

  He slung the shotgun around to his back, scrambled down the steps, and dragged Kimberly to the sharecropper’s house. He left a trail of blood, brains, and gore that should disappear with a good rain. He tugged the concrete lid from a buried cistern he’d spotted on his way in. The gutters from the old sharecropper house once drained into it, allowing the family to pump water inside. Peering down into the hole, Lloyd spotted a dead crow floating in oily black water.

  He rolled Kimberly into the cistern, trying not to look at her. When he was done he replaced the lid and kicked dirt onto the bloodstains. He didn’t want to leave anything that might encourage folks to look into the cistern. He resisted the urge to burn the place to the ground, not wanting the attention that would bring. Instead, he hurried back through the woods to his horse and set out for the camp.

  As he rode, he wondered what Jim was doing that very moment. He’d like to have the opportunity to talk to him about what he’d done. Was this how Jim felt when he killed someone to protect his community? How long would this bitter emptiness last? Did it ever go away once you’d taken such a step?

  64

  Jim’s Valley

  When Pete told Charlie about the Wimmers showing up at the gate and accusing them of burning the bridge, Charlie pretended like he knew nothing about it. When Pete bought his story, Charlie realized that Hugh must not have told him that he suspected Charlie had done it. The fact that the Wimmers had immediately accused Jim’s family solidified some of the things that had been running through Charlie’s head lately. It was dumb of them to allow people to live in their valley who didn’t share their same values.

  Jim was more tolerant of those things than Charlie. He allowed a lot that Charlie might not have allowed if he was in charge. Charlie didn’t want to be in charge though. He liked Jim and he liked Jim making the decisions. However, Jim wasn’t there and someone had to make the hard calls. Someone had to keep them safe.

  He’d been trying. Killing Willie and burning the bridge weren’t done for mischief. They were moves intended to make life safer for the people in the valley. Just because Jim was gone didn’t mean they could get lazy. They couldn’t be seen as weak. They needed to take bold, decisive actions, and that was exactly what Charlie was investigating at the moment.

  In between jobs, when he could slip away from Randi and Pete, he’d been watching the Wimmer house. He’d been doing it for three days now, collecting information on who was there and their patterns of movement. What were their routines? Who did what chores? Who ventured out regularly and who stuck close to home? Those were all things he needed to know.

  He wasn’t entirely certain why yet. He believed if he watched them long enough an idea, or opportunity, might present itself. Meanwhile, he wrote down everything he observed in a notepad Hugh had given him. The paper was made out of something special so that it didn’t become soggy when he carried it around in his pocket. Pete had one too and they carried them everywhere they went.

  The Wimmers hadn’t begun rebuilding the burned bridge yet, though they’d been there twice to survey the scene. The obvious problem was that they’d already cut down the most readily accessible trees for use on the bridge. Rebuilding it again would require a greater effort because they’d have to cut trees from a little farther off and drag them to the site. It wasn’t a tremendous distance but such efforts were monumental without the assistance of dozers, cranes, and excavators. Unable to hear their conversations, Charlie was uncertain if they were making plans for a new bridge or discussing some alternate plans.

  Charlie considered bringing Hugh in on his operation. He looked up to the guy nearly as much as he did to Jim, but something prevented him from doing so. It was a simple formula. If Jim was here, Charlie wouldn’t have to be taking these measures. Jim would take care of things and Charlie would fall in line like a good soldier. Without Jim around, Hugh was in a position to pull the plug on Charlie’s efforts and he wasn’t ready to let that happen yet. In fact, he felt like he had to do everything within his power to keep that from happening.

  After he’d watched the Wimmers for an hour, Charlie checked his watch and saw he’d spent all the time there he could. He’d claimed that he was going off to take a quick nap at lunchtime. If he didn’t show up when work resumed, someone would come looking for him. Then he’d have explaining to do and he wasn’t ready for that. For now this was his secret.

  Charlie shoved the notebook and pen into his pack. On his hands and knees, he began crawling backward from his observation post, dragging his pack with one hand and his rifle with the other. He’d made it less than three feet before a boot landed on his butt and shoved him face down in the dirt.

  Charlie was stunned for a moment, then flipped over onto his back to defend himself. He dropped a hand to his belt, going for his handgun before it clicked in his brain that it was Hugh who’d shoved him to the ground. “What the fuck?”

  Hugh dropped to a knee and snatched Charlie’s pack. He dug inside it, then extracted the notebook Charlie had been writing in. Charlie made a move to snatch it but Hugh raised a warning eyebrow at him.

  “I should be asking you the same question,” Hugh whispered. “What the fuck indeed?”

  Charlie was i
nstantly on the defensive. “I wasn’t doing anything. I was just collecting intelligence. That’s what you always say you’re doing, right? After what happened the other day at the gate, I thought we might need to keep an eye on them. We need to make sure everyone is safe.”

  Hugh cut his eyes from the open notebook to Charlie. “What were you going to do? Launch an attack on them in the middle of the night? Snipe them from this hill? Burn their house to the ground?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I wasn’t going to do anything. I was just watching. We can’t let these people run over us.”

  “We can’t just run people out of the valley because we don’t agree with them, either. This family was here first. These people have roots.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Things change. Maybe it’s time for them to change.”

  Hugh shoved the notebook into his own pocket. “And maybe it’s time for you to grow up and be a team player. We need to be working together here, Charlie. I’ve got my own shit to do but I can’t get to it because I’m afraid to let you out of my sight. I’ve kept an eye on you for days because I felt like you were up to something. Now I know what it is.”

  Hugh tugged Charlie to his feet. “Get your shit and let’s get out of here.”

  Charlie grabbed his pack and his rifle. He hurried after Hugh, who was already walking off into the woods.

  “You going to ask me what happens next?” Hugh asked. “That’s what you always want to know. What I’m going to do with what I figured out.”