Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (12 page)

As he gunned his truck down Nebula
Road, Luke tried not to let his growing sense of futility get the best of him,
but the truth was, he had no idea where Joe Rob was supposed to meet the Porch
men. He didn’t even know
when
the meet was supposed to happen. All he
knew was that Joe Rob had said,
They got Skeeter and say they’ll cut off his
head if I don’t show. Why
, Luke wondered,
would Fate Porch take such
drastic action as kidnapping Skeeter in the first place?
If he wanted Joe
Rob, why didn’t he just snatch him too, rather than use Skeeter as an
instrument of coercion? It was a reckless scheme, and reckless was one thing
Fate Porch was not. Maybe Fate was not in on it. Maybe his boys were acting on
their own. That could explain the recklessness, but Luke doubted that Fate’s
boys would undertake such action without consulting the old man. If they did,
there would be hell to pay when Fate found out. Based on everything he knew
about the Porches, Luke knew that Fate had to be running this show. Something
had happened to Odell, and Fate was holding Skeeter and Joe Rob responsible.
And with Joe Rob being so willing to shoot it out with the Porches, he must
feel that he has nothing to lose. Had he killed Odell? Luke could think of no
other explanation for this desperate situation. But if Joe Rob actually
believed he could go against the Porches and best them in a shootout, the boy
was in for a rude and deadly awakening. Joe Rob had been a fearless running
back on the football field, bowling over defenders rather than run around them,
but he was out of his league with the Porches.

The police-band radio spit the
crackling voice of Chief Keller, interrupting Luke’s rambling train of thought.
“Chieftain, what’s your location? Over.” Chieftain had been Luke’s call sign
when he was still chief and Keller insisted that he keep it.

“Nebula Road, westbound,” he
responded.

“Roger, Chieftain. Be advised, I’m
approaching the Bottom. All quiet so far.”

“Ten-four, Unit One. Watch
yourself, Chief.”

“Roger that.”

Luke had been monitoring the radio
traffic, so he knew that Craig Hemphill was cruising the back roads east of
town and Alvin Snow was covering the north sector. The only other officer on
duty was Roy Crane, who was back at the station with Holly Stimson, the
full-time dispatcher. For a town the size of Vinewood, with its population of
five thousand, this was a full complement of on-duty cops, and with Luke acting
as an auxiliary officer, manpower was bolstered by 25%. Nevertheless, Luke knew
that wasn’t enough. They were searching for a needle in a hay field, and time
was running out.

Holly Stimson’s all-business voice
came over of the radio. “All units, all units, we have an emergency situation
on Main Street. The sinkhole just took down a dump truck.” 

“Say again, Holly,” Keller
responded.

“Another piece of Main Street fell
into the hole. The dump-truck driver is apparently injured.”

“Jumping Jesus,” said Keller.

 Luke winced at the new chief’s
improper radio procedure.

“I’m on the way, Holly,” said the
chief. “Alvin, you and Roy proceed to the scene. Luke, I’ve got to handle this.
Looks like we’re drilling a dry hole anyway. Call in if you find anything.”

“Roger, One.” Luke sighed in
frustration. He was on his own. The Lone Ranger without a badge.

With Keller on his way back to
town, Luke decided to drive out to the Bottom and pay a visit to the Porch
homestead himself. If none of the menfolk were there, he knew that Agnes Porch
would be. From his surreptitious eavesdropping he also knew the old lady
wielded considerable power in the family because of her supposed gift of second
sight, and that Fate was superstitious enough to have faith in his mother’s
visions. From the conversations Luke had overheard, he deduced that the old
lady’s belief system was a patchwork of Christianity and backwoods hoodoo, the
latter probably acquired during the years she lived in Louisiana. She was also
something of a busybody, keeping close tabs on the activities of Fate and his
boys. If the family business included nefarious dealings with Joe Rob and
Skeeter, she would most likely know something about it, but whether Luke could
wheedle any useful information from her, he had great doubt. At the moment, he
figured it was his best shot.

If he found Fate at home, Luke was
prepared to confront him with Joe Rob’s allegation that the Porches had
threatened to cut off Skeeter’s head. Of course, Fate would deny that any such
threat was made, but it would put the bastard on notice that the police were on
to him and might cause him to call off any plan for violent action. On the
other hand, if they had kidnapped Skeeter Partain, they couldn’t very well let
him go without facing felony charges. The witness would have to be eliminated.
The way the Porches played things out, Skeeter’s life was forfeit. And like
Monroe Shockley’s head, his body might never be found.

Luke glanced at his watch. It was a
quarter to eleven. He pushed the speedometer up to 70, the truck’s tires
humming over the blacktop as he whipped past cornfields, cotton fields, cow
pastures and wooded flatlands. The sun was in and out of the clouds, and the
air was already oppressively hot, promising another afternoon scorcher.

Luke’s last face-to-face encounter
with Fate Porch still haunted him. He had been executing a search warrant
during the course of his investigation of Monroe Shockley’s murder. While his
six-man team searched Fate’s farmhouse and property for physical evidence which
could link him to the killing and decapitation of Shockley, Fate returned in
his pickup from a trip into town and accosted Luke on the front porch.

“What the hell you think you’re
doing, Chaney?” Fate demanded, his face an angry crimson beneath his white
stubble of beard.

Luke handed him the search warrant
and said, “My job. I know you murdered Monroe Shockley and I’m going to nail it
to you, one way or another.”

Fate exploded with forced laughter.
“What you think, I got his head hid under my bed? Or a murder weapon stashed in
the closet? You’re a sorry excuse for a lawman, Chaney. All you’re doing here
is making a goddamn fool of yourself. Folks in town’s already laughing at you
behind your back. I hear they already looking for a new chief. And you think
tearing up my house is gonna help your case? I think you’re digging your own
grave.”

“Are you threatening me?” Luke
asked, biting back his anger.

“
Hell
no. I got no cause to
threaten you. I’m just gonna sit back and watch you do yourself in. And I tell
you what’s the truth. I’m gonna enjoy every goddamn minute of it.”

Luke could still hear the echo of
those raspy words, and they rankled and stung now more than they did then.
Maybe
Porch was right when he called me a sorry excuse for a lawman. But I’m not a
lawman anymore, and I’m not done with him yet. Not by a long shot.

As he drove down the gravel road to
the farmhouse, Luke saw Fate’s Ford pickup off to the side, its front end
resting against a tall magnolia tree. He pulled up beside the Ford and saw
Agnes Porch slumped against the steering wheel, her long white hair hanging
like a bright shroud over her thin shoulders.

He jumped out of his truck, threw
opened the Ford’s door and said, “Miz Porch? Are you all right?”

The old woman raised her head from
the wheel, looked at him through the cracked lens of her bifocals and mumbled,
“... reaper.”

“Ma’am?”

Her gray eyes seemed to be swimming
in a sea of wrinkled flesh. “All dead,” she said.

“Who’s all dead?” he asked, a
sinking feeling in his belly.

Agnes Porch looked down at her
hands as if trying to read something in them, though they were empty. “I was
going...”

“Going where, Miz Porch?”

“To stop it.” She began to rub her
fingers with her thumbs, the parchment-like skin making dry whispers. “They
don’t know.”

“To stop
what
?” Luke put his
hand on her bony shoulder.

“It’s too dark,” she moaned. “Can’t
see.”

“Where’s your son? Where’s Fate?”

“Fate? Fate!” she called. “You come
back here!”

Luke sighed in frustration. “Don’t
move, Miz Porch. I’m going to call for an ambulance.” He went to his truck,
grabbed the handset, called the station and told Holly Stimson to send an
ambulance. Then he went back to the old lady’s side and tried to assess the
extent of her injuries, but she was too disoriented to give reliable feedback.
There was a knot on her forehead where her head must’ve struck the steering
wheel, but he could see no other signs of external injuries. He knew there was
a possibility of internal injuries, especially for a brittle-boned woman in her
nineties, so he didn’t try to move her from the seat of Fate’s truck. He would
leave that to the EMS crew.

“Help’s on the way,” he told her.
“They’ll take you to the hospital and make sure you’re okay.”

If she understood, she gave no
indication. She continued to mumble to herself. Luke talked to her, hoping to
break through her confusion and find out where the old woman without a driver’s
license had been going when she crashed into the tree. If he could find that
out, he might be able to stop a bloodbath—if it wasn’t already too late.

Joe Rob was on his way to Cedar
Cove Trailer Park to score some coke from Candyman when the carload of blacks
cut in front of him at the four-way stop five miles west of town. With just
over an hour to kill before his appointed rendezvous at the old railroad
trestle, he had decided that snorting some blow would make him battle-ready and
give him an extra edge on the enemy.

And if Candyman was holding some
speed, he would cop some of that too. When the shooting started, he wanted to
be a supercharged balls-to-the-wall instrument of aggression. An invincible
warrior. A berserker driven by blood lust.

He smiled when he saw Ho Down hop
out of the car with a baseball bat in his hands. “Just what I need,” he said to
himself. “A tune-up for the Big Show.”

Joe Rob killed the Mustang’s engine
and stepped out to meet Ho Down and his three pals.

Holding up the bat with one hand,
Ho Down said, “This my lucky day, Blow Job. I’m gonna hit a home run off your
head.”

A fat guy with a crowbar and a
bushy Afro climbed out of the back seat and stood beside Ho Down. He held the
crowbar down by his right leg. He was sweating profusely and Joe Rob read
uncertainty in his eyes.

“Then Fro here gonna get in some
licks just ’cause he don’t like white folks,” Ho Down added. “Right, Fro?”

Fro nodded. The other two young men
leaned against the Chevy to watch the fun. One of them had a nasty smirk on his
face. The other was smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings.

“You dead, muthafucka,” Ho Down
said as he gripped the bat with both hands and raised it over his right
shoulder.

Joe Rob opened his hunting jacket
with his left hand and pulled the .45 from the waist of his jeans with his
right. He raised the pistol and pointed it at Ho Down’s face. “Looks like you
just struck out, asshole,” he said, grinning.

Ho Down dropped the bat and backed
up, “Hey, man, we just fuckin’ wit-cha. That’s all. Ain’t no need to go busting
no caps. Tell him, Fro. We just playin’. Right?”

The uncertainty in Fro’s eyes had
already changed to wide-eyed fright. He backed into one of his car-leaning
pals, the one whose smirk had turned into a grimace. “Yeh, yeh, that’s right,”
Fro agreed.

Joe Rob shifted his aim to Fro,
pointing the muzzle at his belly. “Know what a .45 slug would do to your gut?”

“Don’t wanna know,” he said. His
milk-chocolate skin was turning several shades lighter.

“It would pretty much turn your
guts to chunky soup and make an even bigger hole as it blew out your back.
That’s if it didn’t hit your spine. If
that
happened, you probably
wouldn’t feel too much pain while you were waiting to die.”

“You ain’t gotta shoot me, man,”
stammered Fro. “We just wanted to scare ya, that’s all.”

“Tell you what,” Joe Rob said. “You
do what I tell you and I won’t shoot you. How’s that?”

“Yeah, okay. What you want me to
do?”

The older-looking man standing in
front of the Chevy’s rear fender said, “Shee-it, he ain’t gone shoot nobody.”

Joe Rob turned slightly and fired
the gun. The slug went between Shee-it Man’s lower legs and exploded the rear
tire. The Chevy’s rear-end sank on the flat.

“Goddamn!” Shee-it Man yelled.

“Next one draws blood,” said Joe
Rob. “You want it to be yours?”

“No suh,” he answered, looking down
at his legs.

“All right, Fro,” Joe Rob said,
waving the .45 in his direction. “Here’s what I want you to do. Get a good grip
on that crowbar and break Ho Down’s legs.”

“What?”

“Do it now. If you don’t, I’ll
shoot you.”

“You serious?”

“I’ll count to three. Oh, and Ho
Down? If you try to run I’ll shoot
you
.”

“Fuck, man, this is fucked up,” Ho
Down protested. “Why you—”

“One...” Joe Rob pointed the pistol
back at Fro’s belly.

Fro said, “Sorry, man, I ain’t got
no choice.” Then he cocked the crowbar behind his shoulder...

“Two...”

...and swung it in a short arc that
was more of a golf swing than a batter’s cut.

The iron bar smacked into the side
of Ho Down’s lower leg, knocking it out from under him and toppling him to the
grassy shoulder of the road. He screamed and gripped his injured leg with both
hands, rocking on his bowed spine.

“Now do the other leg,” Joe Rob
ordered.

“Aw, man,” said Fro, even as he
positioned himself for the next hit with the crowbar.

“No! Please!” bellowed Ho Down,
letting go of his injured leg and trying to crawl out of range of the next
swing.

“Do it,” warned Joe Rob.

Fro took aim and delivered the
second blow, catching Ho Down across the shin of his left leg. They all heard
the sharp crack and knew the leg was broken. Ho Down screamed and thrashed his
upper body on the ground. Tears streamed down his dark cheeks.
“Gotdammuthafuckinsonofabitch,” he yelled.

His three companions looked with
pained expressions at their suffering friend, all casting wary glances at Joe
Rob.

 Joe Rob waved his pistol at them
and said, “Next time you boys think about fucking with somebody like me,
remember this broke-leg piece of shit here.”

Then he stuck the pistol in his
jeans, climbed into the Mustang and peeled off down the blacktop. “Dumb
motherfuckers,” he said, then turned up his music and proceeded to the trailer
park.

***

The ambulance lady told Corny his
wrist wasn’t broken. Just sprained, she said. She was pretty, and Corny had
sprouted a fat hard-on while she was touching his sore wrist. He couldn’t keep
his eyes off her big tits sticking out behind her white shirt with the EMS
patch on the shoulder and the nametag over the right tit that said her name was
Jones. He wondered what her first name was but he was afraid to ask her. He
wanted to get away from her before she noticed the way his stiff dick was
pushing up the crotch of his overalls. “Put some ice on it when you get home,”
she said. He hoped she meant his wrist. She gave him a smile and went over to
the edge of the hole to stand by her male partner who was watching the firemen
trying to get the dump-truck driver out of his truck and out of the hole. They
were talking to the driver so he wasn’t dead. The policemen were there too,
trying to keep everybody away from the sinkhole. Corny didn’t want to get any
closer to the hole. He’d already heard people say the hole might get even
bigger, might even swallow up some of the stores next. He was close enough to
hear the new chief arguing with Mr. Peters, the boss of the town council. Mr.
Peters’ face turned red he was so angry.

“This is on your head,” Mr. Peters
was saying to Chief Keller. “You’re in charge of public safety. That idiot you
call an expert doesn’t know his ass from...from a hole in the ground. All he
did was shine a light down there and say that was it, it wouldn’t get any
bigger. Well, I talked to an engineering geologist and he said we need to hire
a crew to do extensive drilling down there to find out how big the damn thing
is. Christ, there could be a whole series of caverns underground. I just hope
to God there aren’t any lawsuits because of your mishandling of this. We’re
going to have to spend a lot of money on a consulting firm to get this thing
properly explored and filled in. We can’t afford lawyers to fight lawsuits.”

The chief was getting mad too.
Corny could tell by the way the vein in his temple was standing out and
throbbing like a hard-on. “Sanders is a geologist. I thought he knew what he
was talking about.”

“For Christ’s sake, Keller. Sanders
is a high school teacher who majored in geology. Now, until we find out how
extensive this damn thing is, I want you to block all of Main Street to
vehicular traffic and advise pedestrians that they will be shopping here at
their own risk. It’s going to hurt the merchants, but public safety has to come
first.”

Corny didn’t understand all the big
words Mr. Peters used, but he understood that there might be a lot of caves
down there under Main Street, and maybe under some of the stores too. That was
a scary thought. That was about as scary as that weird dark he’d seen moving
around down in the hole. Corny wished he knew what it was that lived down there
in those hidden caverns, moving around like a blobby black ghost. Whisperer
knew something was down there, but Whisperer hadn’t told him what it was. Maybe
Whisperer didn’t know what it was. Corny’s hard-on went away as he watched the
fire/rescue team haul the truck driver up on a metal basket-looking thing. The sexy
ambulance lady and her partner loaded the driver in the ambulance and zoomed
him off to the hospital, Christmas-colored lights flashing and siren whooping.
Corny wandered back to the boarding house to put ice on his sore wrist, his
mind teeming with dark images of haunted underground caverns and sexy women
with big tits.