A Time of Torment (18 page)

The nightmare had returned maybe two dozen times in the years since, but five times in the last two weeks alone, and a few nights Odell woke from it because he’d peed his bed. On the first occasion, he’d been so frightened and ashamed that he’d roused the house, and his mother had cleaned him up and helped him to change his pajamas while his grandmother took the sheets from the bed and put newspaper down to dry the mattress. Both of them had been bad-tempered the next day because of their disturbed night.

The second time it happened, Odell’s mother threatened to put him back in diapers, and his grandmother came home that evening with a plastic sheet that she put over the mattress, ‘just in case of accidents’. It made Odell feel like a baby. He’d only peed himself once since then, and on that occasion he hid his pajamas under his bed and cleaned and dried them himself when he got home from school. But the nightmare itself kept returning, and when it did he was unable to get back to sleep. He remained away from the window when he did wake, and instead re-read old comic books with a flashlight under the sheets. He didn’t want to use his bedside lamp. Odell’s bedroom was little more than a converted storage room adjoining his mother’s bedroom, but it was his space, and he loved it. He had to be careful, though, because the lamplight showed under his door. It also shone through the thin drapes, where it could be seen from the road, and Odell didn’t want that to happen.

The nightmare was so persistent by now that Odell had almost forgotten it was real, all of it: the girl, the dogs, the man named Lucius – him most of all. Odell had watched it happen, except that first time – the real time – he’d managed to get back into bed before Lucius reached the window. Odell had heard his footsteps, though, and then his breathing. Odell stayed very still, and eventually Lucius went away, but Odell didn’t move a muscle until he heard his mother wake hours later, just in case it was a trick and the man was still spying on him.

He could have told his mother and grandmother what he had seen. He should have, because it would have been the right thing to do, except the next day, when he was walking to the trailer from the school bus, a man had emerged from the woods next to where his mother parked her car, and the afternoon sun had caught the redness of his hair. Odell wanted to run and try to lock himself inside, but Lucius had been too fast for him, and was beside him before the message to move had even reached Odell’s feet.

He knew Lucius’s name because he’d heard his mother speak of him to her own mother, just as they sometimes whispered of others from the Cut: Oberon, Cassander.
But Lucius is the worst of them
, his mother would say.
The worst of any world
, his grandmother would counter.

Lucius said only one thing to Odell – ‘I know where your momma works. Don’t make me take her for a ride.’ – before putting a finger to his lips, enjoining the boy to silence. Then he ruffled Odell’s hair, and vanished into the Cut.

Now Odell was sitting on the edge of his bed, trembling. His pajamas were wet again. He wanted to cry. That night’s version of the nightmare had been a new one. This time, the girl was in his room. Her boobies were very big, and as Odell stared at them little beads of milk bubbled from the nipples. The girl smelled bad. The thumb of her right hand was missing, but the stump wasn’t bleeding.

‘Your momma’s safe,’ she told Odell, and as she spoke a bug crawled through her hair. ‘They don’t take colored folk.’

That was when Odell woke, and it was all he could do not to start screaming for his momma, because he could still smell the girl in the room, just as he could smell his own pee. But he managed not to make a sound, and just sat, and shook, and wished that he’d never looked out the window that September night.

He heard a vehicle slowing down outside before grinding to a halt. Odell often heard vehicles coming and going at odd hours, because it was his family’s misfortune to live within sight of one of the roads into the Cut, but they never stopped. A door opened. Odell didn’t want to look, but a man’s voice swore, and another said something in reply that Odell couldn’t catch. The gap in the drapes was still visible. It drew Odell.

‘No,’ he whispered. Why did it have to be here? Why couldn’t they have stopped someplace else? The lady taken by the dogs was bad enough, but now this? Yet he was already on his feet. One step. Two. He pressed his eye to the opening.

The van was brown or black – he couldn’t be sure – but he could see that the right front tire was flat. That was what the two men who stood beside it were talking about. A third joined them, and Odell recognized him from around town, although he did not know his name.

‘We walk him,’ said the third man. ‘Benedict can change the tire, and follow on.’

One of the others went to the side door of the van, opened it, and climbed inside. When he appeared again, he was leading a fourth man by a rope around his neck. This man had his hands tied behind his back, and a sack over his head. He had to be helped from the van so that he didn’t stumble and fall. Once he was safely outside, the van door was closed behind him, and he was pulled toward the woods. The third man spoke to the one called Benedict, who was preparing to jack the van. When he was finished, he turned and glanced over at the Watson trailer.

I shouldn’t have done this
, thought Odell.
I shouldn’t have looked
.

A hand closed over his mouth. He struggled against it until his mother’s voice whispered to him.

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Hush.’

She held Odell tight against her, and together they watched.

This time, unlike Lucius, the man did not approach the window. A voice called to him from the woods – ‘Need some help here!’ – and he turned away, stepping around the front of the van and into the trees.

Odell started to cry against his mother’s hand. She took it away from his mouth. His grandmother appeared at the door, a gown wrapped around her against the cold.

‘I did it again, Momma,’ Odell whispered. ‘I wet myself. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t worry, honey,’ she replied. ‘It’s not your fault. But don’t say nothing about this, not to nobody, you hear me?’

He nodded. He understood. He didn’t want anyone to take his mother for a ride. Outside, he heard Benedict remove the first of the wheel nuts.

‘Come away, now,’ said his mother. ‘Come away and leave them to their business.’

That night he slept in his mother’s bed, wearing only clean underwear. They were both still awake – his grandmother too, Odell guessed, because he couldn’t hear her snoring – when the van eventually started up and drove away, disappearing into the forest.

Vanishing into the Cut.

S
heriff Edward Henkel of the Plassey County Sheriff’s Department pulled over to the side of the road and tried to control his breathing. He had almost hit a deer. He certainly would have, had he been traveling any faster, and the buck was big enough to have come through the windshield and killed him. It had appeared out of the mist so suddenly that he’d barely had a chance to register the animal before it was in front of him. He couldn’t even remember hitting the brake; it was as though the car had been stopped for him by some outside agency, and his foot had only ended up on the brake as a matter of course.

Henkel’s chest hurt. It had been paining him a lot lately, which was why he’d gone to see his physician in the first place. He’d been experiencing breathlessness as well, and a dizziness if he stood up too suddenly, along with nausea and lassitude, although he’d put it down to flu until the pain started. A quick Internet search revealed that, at forty-nine, Ed Henkel was experiencing all the warning signs of an impending heart attack. Like just about every man born since the time of Adam, he’d considered swallowing some medication and taking it easy for a few days because, first of all, there was no point in overreacting if it really was just the flu; and second, if he was having heart problems then his life could be about to change, and that was assuming he survived whatever was coming to begin with, because the biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.

Henkel was divorced, and his two teenage children now lived with his ex-wife and her second husband in Cleveland. Relations between them all were pretty good, even if Henkel didn’t get to see his kids quite as often as he might have liked, and they were at the age when they didn’t care much to be hauled off to Turley for two weekends a month just so their dad could feel a like a real father once again. As a result, he’d agreed to monthly visits instead, simply to make the kids happy, and it had kind of worked: Dennis, his son, was now less hostile than he used to be when he came back to Turley, but Kim, the younger of the two, remained a monster. He was assured by other fathers with daughters of a similar age that this was not unusual among fifteen-year-old girls, and he should not take it personally. Even Irene, the woman who had bought the dry cleaners in Mortonsville, and with whom he had recently begun a tentative relationship, assured him it was just a phase and Kim would mellow in time, although this was before Irene was actually exposed to his daughter, an experience which caused her to modify her opinion somewhat, as well as consume the best part of a bottle of Merlot to help calm her nerves.

Henkel hadn’t told Irene about the chest pains, or the sickness, just as he hadn’t informed her of the visit to the doctor after he woke at four a.m. in agony and decided that, no, this wasn’t like any flu he’d experienced before. He’d have to inform her about the subsequent angiogram, though, because they’d shaved away a section of hair at his groin in order to insert the dye tube into the blood vessel, and she’d be certain to notice any changes to his personal grooming in that area.

He wondered if death was now shadowing him.

The Mortonsville Police Department cruiser stood at the edge of a sparse patch of woodland that sloped down to a pond in which nothing swam or lived because of all the pollutants that had been dumped in it over the years. In summer it was a mass of insects, and gave off an acrid, chemical stink. It didn’t smell a whole lot better in the fall, but at least the insects were fewer. On the other hand, the pond now appeared to have some competition in the stench stakes.

Chief Bentley himself had made the call to Henkel using his personal cell phone, so that the information didn’t go out over the bands just yet. Bentley was a small, wiry man in his early sixties, and should have retired long ago, but he was tied to his town and his job. If he left the latter, then he’d probably have to leave the former too, because he wouldn’t be able to stand by and watch someone else rule the roost. Bentley was defined by his position in Mortonsville. Without it, he would feel himself to be nothing.

Now, as Henkel pulled in beside the Mortonsville car, he saw Bentley appear in a gap between the trees and wave his hat. Henkel picked up his own hat from the passenger seat, took a fresh pair of plastic gloves from the box on the floor, and trudged down to join him. The last of the season’s flies buzzed around, and in the clear morning light he thought he could see a larger cloud of them deeper in the woods. He picked up the odor of decay as he drew closer, and was relieved when the first thing that Bentley did, even before they began to speak, was hand over a tube of mentholated ointment. Henkel smeared some over his top lip and around his nostrils. The smell was still there, but the menthol took the edge from it.

Henkel slipped on his gloves, and Bentley did the same with the pair hanging from a pocket of his pants.

‘Who found them?’ asked Henkel, the first word he’d spoken since he arrived.

‘Charlie Lutter’s boy.’

‘Uh-huh.

Perry Lutter was simple. He had a part-time job at Shelby’s Diner washing dishes and sweeping floors, and liked to draw pictures of zoo animals to give to folks. He was the Lutters’ only child, born when they were in their forties. Both were nearly eighty now, and Henkel wasn’t sure what would happen to their son when they were gone. He figured the boy would have to go into some kind of home, because he sure couldn’t take care of himself.

‘He told his mother,’ said Bentley, ‘and then his father called me. He asked if the boy’s name could be kept out of it. I said I’d do my best.’

The bodies lay partly uncovered in a pit at the heart of the copse. Bentley saw animal tracks in the dirt – fox, probably, although he wasn’t any kind of expert. His first thought was that the hole should have been dug deeper, maybe with stones laid on top of the remains, except there weren’t many stones nearby fit for purpose. It suggested a rushed job, or the work of someone who didn’t much care if the remains were found or not.

The bodies were both male, and Henkel thought that they’d been in the ground for possibly a week. Maybe it was the way they’d landed in the hole, but they lay side by side, one with his head on the chest of the other, an arm draped loosely around him in an embrace reminiscent of consolation. They’d both been shot in the head at close range, the caliber of the bullet big enough to leave massive exit wounds that had distorted their features even before rot started to have its way with them.

‘You look for ID?’ asked Henkel.

‘I checked their pockets, but they’re empty. I didn’t want to go disturbing them more than was necessary.’

Henkel squatted by the grave. He wished that he’d used more of the menthol. Judging by their clothing and general appearance, he thought the victims might be in their late twenties, or even a few years younger. One of them had a barbed wire tattoo around his right wrist. That might help with formal identification, although already Henkel had some idea of who they might be, and suspected that Bentley did, too.

‘Dustin Huff,’ said Henkel, pointing at the body with the tattoo, the one with its arm draped around the other.

‘Which makes the other Robbie Killian,’ said Bentley.

‘Would be my guess.’

Killian and Huff were out of Columbus, Ohio originally, but with business interests in West Virginia. They’d begun by selling weed, and quickly progressed to OxyContin, meth, and whatever else the market could bear. They were ambitious, and word was they’d cut a deal back home with some Mexicans to sell and distribute heroin. Killian’s family was wealthy, at least by the standards of this part of the world, and willing to indulge their son with money as long as he stayed out of their hair, a source of funds from which Huff and Killian had drawn to start their enterprise. Sensibly, they’d stayed away from Plassey County, or so it had seemed until a kid named Lucie Holmes overdosed at a party in Deep Dell a few weeks back and almost died. Although nobody could confirm it, the suspicion was that the heroin she’d injected had been supplied, directly or indirectly, by Killian and Huff. Plassey County was an untapped market, and emboldened by their connections, the two young men had decided to make it theirs.