Edward Lee (11 page)

Wound up and around. And—

Wham.

A cottage, just like the girl had said. Ramshackle old place, falling in on itself like the deadfall. Ivy growing up rotted sideboarding, missing shingles like missing teeth. A human pock in the woods. But—

What the fuck?

This was the craziest thing he'd ever seen. A squatter cottage, yes, but parked right before the crumbling front porch sat a gleaming Rolls Royce Silver Shadow.

Guess this old man Martin's not dead after all,
Cummings assumed, but the rest was folly.
A hillfolk shoemaker? Must sell a lot of shoes to be able to drive a car like that...

Cummings pulled right up. If he wanted the element of surprise, he'd blown it royally: anyone in the cottage would be able to hear his car ease up. But, wait—

No,
he thought.

They wouldn't be able to hear at all. Because another sound permeated the surrounding woods.

A high-pitched screech.

A...
Cummings' ponderings were guillotined by what he next thought. It couldn't be. No cop was that lucky.

The screech sounded like a power tool. A power
drill.

No way. no way,
he thought. He disembarked, walked up to the house, peeked into a side window.

Cramped room. Would've been large were it not for all the junk. Tools, leather sheets hanging. Rows and rows of hand-carved wooden shoeblocks. And—

A table.

No way, no way,
Cummings thought yet again, but this time the thought was drained as a bled pig.

The screeching ceased. Then a voice erupted, a crotchety, old hillbilly voice.

"Get it, son. Ooo-eee! Cut yerself a
good
peckerhole in that cracker head! I ain't lyin' ta ya. Travis! This here's the white trash bastard who done head-humped yer maw!"

Was Cummings gazing into a rent in hell? On the table lay a well-dressed man, on his back, a cleanly cut hole gushing blood as a ham-hock hand withdrew a knife from the hole. The hand belonged to Travis Clyde Tuckton, the boy whose photograph Cummings had already seen at the state crime lab. And sitting off from the table was a wizened, whiskered old man in a wheelchair. A man with—

No feet,
Cummings recognized.

Jake Martin. Tuckton"s grandfather...

"I'se so pissed. I'se in a
swivet.
Grandpap!"

"Only fittin' an’ proper, son. Just like it says in God's book. An eye fer a eye!"

"An" a heads fer a head!"

Cummings stared.

The boy, a big, brawny, short-haired lad with a surprisingly friendly face, lowered his trousers and promptly inserted his erect penis into the hole in the corpse's head. Then, biting his lower lip in a perverse rage, he grabbed the corpse's ears, and—

Began to hump.

He began to hump the head.

"Ooo-eee!" the footless old man exclaimed. "Hump that there evil head, boy. I say,
hump
it!"

As Cummings stared on, his sentience felt akin to a swamp rat racing round in his mind, madly seeking exit. The old man in the chair had his penis out too, was masturbating as he whooped. And Tuckton continued to hump the head in a fury...

"Yeah. Travis! Do'm up
reals
good!" the old man celebrated, his hand choking his own penis like a chicken neck. "Get'cher self off a
dandy
nut in that there head!"

"Gonna come in his head so hard. Grandpappy" the boy huffed, humping away, "my peckersnot's gonna squirt out his butt!"

"Yeah, boy! Yeeeeeah!"

So here it was, right before Cummings’ eyes. He'd stumbled upon this, he was
watching
it, for God's sake. He was bearing witness t
ο
the same macabre crime which had obsessed him for months.

He was witnessing a header...

Cummings, an automaton now, unholstered his service revolver. Turned. Walked up the porch steps and entered the dilapidated house.

"Aw, shee-it, Grandpap," he heard, "I'se gonna gets me off my first nut likes
real fast
in this cracker head!"

"Go fer it, boy! Get it! We'se got all night ta fuck that head, plenty time fer more nuts. Why, I'se'll hump four 'er five times myself! So don’t’cha worry 'bout comin' fast. Pipe a load a juice that'd make yer daddy
proud!"

Numb, and oddly fearless, Cummings stepped into the room.

"Who the
hail!"
the old man cracked.

The boy, evidently in the spasms of orgasm, slowed down his pelvic thrusts into the corpse-head and opened his eyes.

'"S'a cop!" he realized.

BAM.'

Cummings squeezed off the first shot. The boy's eye disappeared as a pulpy red blur, and he fell away from the table, from the... head. He landed on the wood floor hard as a side of fresh-butchered beef, his erection still pulsing down, offering semen to the air.

"Ya blammed fuckin' cop! Look what'cha done!"

BAM!

Cummings' second shot caught the old man in the belly, who doubled over in the wheelchair. And—

BAM!

The third shot divided the top of his head almost as cleanly as a machete through a melon.

Cummings stood. Stared. For the second time in a day his eyes went wide in spite of rising cordite. Silence like a graveyard at 3 a.m. insinuated about him, and so did the simple thought.

I just solved the head-humping murders.

That's all it had taken. Three shots from his service revolver, and it was all over...

What... now?
There was no phone, no way to report the incident to the state. And on this side of the ridge, his radio probably wouldn't reach the dispatcher.

Leave the house. Take the evidence. Go back to the FO and report to State,
he thought robotically.

And Cummings did just that. He redonned his gloves, grabbed a cardboard box from a random shelf. He took a boot off the body of Travis Clyde Tuckton, grabbed the power-drill still fitted with the 3-inch holesaw, grabbed the kitchen knife, and put it all in the box. Then he took it all out to the car and drove back to the Russell County BATF Field Office.

........

The drive back left him stunned—or, not so much the drive, but his musings. Talk about a busy day.
I killed four men in a handful of hours,
he reminded himself at the wheel. The Route opened up, passed endless cornfields and slat-gapped barns. But only two of the dead men mattered. Tuckton and Martin.

The head-humpers.

It was a revitalization he needed. Killing two drug dealers and copping their green was one thing. But... this? In a matter of minutes, and with three shots from his duty piece, he'd solved a murder case...

Cummings parked. A state unmarked was in the lot too, and he could only guess that they were following up Beck's evidence, talking to Peerce.
Save your breath, boys,
he thought proudly.
I just solved the case.
The grotesquerie of what he'd seen was far behind him. He could deal with that later.

He walked into the FO.

"I did it, boss." he announced.

Peerce looked up from his desk.

Cummings was nearly out of breath now. "I solved the head-humping murders."

"Ya did...
what?"

"Caught them in the act, saw it with my own eyes. Shot them. They were... doing it right there in the window."

"Stew—"

"Ex-con named Tuckton, and his grandfather. Had some guy right there on the table and they were... humping... his head."

"Stew, shut up a minute."

Cummings peered. "What's wrong. J.L.? I just got done telling you I solved the header murders."

Peerce spat in his proverbial cup. Only then did Cummings notice the other man in the claustrophobic office.

Hard-looking guy, tall. State uniform but he had stripes down his pants and a crest on the bill of his hat. A state captain or above...

But Cummings noticed something else.

The state officer had his gun drawn.

"This here's major Phil Straker." Peerce told him. "He's liaison officer 'tween state IAD an' narcotics."

"Narc—" But that's all Cummings could get out.

"Yer unner arrest. Stew, fer two count's'a first degree murder."

Cummings fell bolted in place.

"Not to mention." this Straker added, "obstruction of justice, complicity with known felonious criminals, misprision of a felony, the willful theft of ill-gotten gains, and possession and illegal transport of controlled dangerous substances."

"Don't even say nothin', Stew. They got'cha cold," Peerce said. On his desk was a portable field VCR. Peerce turned it on, toned up the tiny screen.

My God.
Cummings thought.

There, right there on the screen. Cummings saw himself, placing first the gym bag and then 10 bags of cocaine into the trunk of his federal car...

"That's
two
counts of murder. Agent Cummings." Strakcr spoke up again, "but one of the men you murdered was a state police officer."

"Dutch," Cummings murmured.

"That's right. He was a state narcotics plant working a sting. We had cameras inside and one outside, for tag numbers. The cameras inside, of course, burned up in the fire you set. But the one outside..."

Straker's free hand bid the VCR screen. On it, Cummings was driving away.

"You're fucked, Stew" Peerce said. "You're an asshole."

"The murder of a police officer," Straker was kind enough to embellish, "as you probably know, carries a mandatory sentence of death in this state."

I'm caught.
Cummings thought simply.
I'm dead.

But he wasn't dead yet, was he?

"Stew, unholster yer piece an' set it on my desk.
Real
slow like."

Straker had his own piece on him.
I'm not going down,
Cummings thought.
I'd rather punch out now than spend a decade years getting butt-fucked in the can while my appeals run out.

Cummings, very slowly, set his service revolver on Peerce's desk.

"Good boy," Straker said.

Cummings shrugged, then, in an instant, lashed his hands out, remembering the pistol-disarm technique they'd taught him in the army. His hands wrapped around Straker's gun, pushed away—

BAM!

The bullet grazed his side but he didn't even feel it.

"Goddamn it. Stew, don't'cha even—"

The automaton again. Cummings had disarmed Straker in less than one full second, had the guy's piece in his hand.

Straker, though shit-scared, tried to maintain his authority. "Don't be stupid. Cummings. You can plea-bargain your way out maybe. You can say you killed them in self-defense and were bringing the money and the coke back here. But if you kill us. you're finished."

BAM!

BAM-BAM!

He took out Peerce first, a clean headshot, then punched Straker's ticket with a double-tap in the 5x. a heartshot. Blood jetted out of the holes a good three feet. Peerce lay limp in his office chair, the back of his head emptied.

Brown tobacco juice drooled as a single rope from the comer of his mouth.

Cummings head was ticking: the swamp rat was back, whipping more circles, trying to find a way out.

Be cool,
he ordered himself, though that was not particularly easy considering he'd killed six men today, three of them police officers.
What's done is done. Don’t freak out.

Think.

Plea bargain? No way. He'd already dumped the cocaine. No judge would buy it. He'd done the only thing he could do to preserve his own life. The way he saw it, he had maybe an hour lead before anyone found the bodies, more if he was lucky. He'd have to pinch a car, blow over the state line, then steal more cars along the way till he got to Mexico. There was no other way.