Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (18 page)

“Maybe it was.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. But when you
were telling me what your guardian angel said, about getting too close to
me...and the darkness, it sort of clicked. Like it made sense in a way.”

“What are you saying?”

“I dunno. That maybe you should
stay away from me. That I’m not good for you.” He shrugged, freed his hand from
her grasp and leaned back in his chair. “You’re too good...too pure to be with
somebody with blood on his hands. You deserve better.”

“That’s crazy. I’m a long way from
pure. I’m just your average sinner who happens to have an overprotective
guardian angel. I’m
certainly not
too good for you, Luke Chaney. If
anything, you’re too good for me. I’m a middle-aged whack-o who sees ghosts in
old mirrors. But you, you were the chief of police, an upstanding citizen. You
risked your life trying to stop men from killing each other. I don’t want to
hear any more of this ‘you’re too good for me’ crap. You hear?”

He tried to smile. “I hear. But I
do feel...tainted. I don’t want it to rub off on you. If darkness ‘gathers’ me,
you might better keep your distance.”

Ree stood up, glided around the
table and wrapped her arms around his head and shoulders and crushed Luke’s
face to her bosom. “I’ll do the gathering around here,” she said. “And if Beau
doesn’t like it, he can stay the hell away from me.”

Luke closed his eyes and gave
himself to the comforting pillows of her breasts. He slipped his arms around
her hips and rested his hands on her firm buttocks. She kissed the top of his
head.

“I think I’m falling in love with
you,” she whispered. “Darkness be damned.”

***

Agnes Porch set the vase of flowers
down on the over-the-bed table and looked up at the chunky young man standing
over her bed. Without her glasses, she couldn’t make out the features of his
face, but she knew him by his whining voice and his adenoidal breathing. Judy’s
boy, Delbert Hicks. Her only grandson still living. “I cain’t stay but a
minute,” he said. “It’s after visiting hours.”

“Del, I need you to do something
for me,” she said. “Something real important.”

“Name it, Granny,” he said. “I’ll
do whatever you say.”

“Shut that door.”

Delbert crossed the room and closed
the heavy door of her hospital room.

“Come close,” she told him. “No
other ears can hear this.”

“Ain’t nobody here but you and me.”

“Mind me, Delbert.”

“Yes ma’am.” He came to the side of
the bed and waited.

Agnes could smell his sweat-soured
clothes and hear his noisy breathing. She took a shallow breath, then said,
“You can’t ever tell nobody any of this. You understand?”

“Yes’m.”

“I want you to go out to our...to
my place and get a shovel out of the barn. Then go out to the old well behind
the house. You remember where that is. Then go about forty paces toward the
woods and you’ll come upon a willow tree sapling. About knee high. Dig it up.
Keep digging till you find a gunnysack. Take the sack to the kitchen and get
the biggest pot you can find and fill it with water and set it to boil.  Here’s
where you’ll need a strong stomach, Delbert. In the gunny sack you’ll find a
man’s head.”

“A
head
?”

“Damn you, boy. Not so loud. We can
go to jail for this.”

“Shit fire, Granny. I don’t know if
I—”

“Hush up and listen. Take the head
and put it in the boiling water. Boil it till the skull is clean. If you have
to do any scraping, take care you don’t damage the skull. Put some bay leaves
and garlic in the pot to make it smell like food’s cooking.”

“It’s Monroe Shockley’s head, ain’t
it?” Delbert said in an excited whisper. “God almighty.”

“’Course it is. That’s why you
can’t tell nobody about it. Not even your momma. You hear?”

“I hear.”

“When you get it all cleaned up,
put it in a clean pillow slip and hide it under my bed.”

“You mean bring it
here
?”

“No, you ninny. Not here. My bed at
home.”

“Oh, yeah.  All right.”

“Whatever’s left in the pot where
you boiled it, dump it in the hole where you dug it up and cover it up good.
Can you remember all that?”

“Yes ma’am. I don’t reckon I could
forget it now if I wanted to.”

“Good boy. Now go on . I’m going
home tomorrow, and I want it to be ready for me. You can do it early in the
morning.”

“What you gonna do with it?”

“I will have my vengeance,” she
said. Talking made the pain in her head worse, but the words had to come out.
“I lost a son and three grandsons. You lost your grandpa and three cousins. You
think them who did it don’t have to pay restitution?” She licked her dry lips.
“They’ll pay in blood and suffering. The whole damn town will pay for the way
they treated us. Mark my words, boy.”

***

Corny slipped out the back door of
the boarding house, the loose sole of his shoe slapping time to his shuffling
gait. He always went out the back way at night because he didn’t want anybody
asking him where he was going. He didn’t like it when people asked him
questions. Questions made him feel dumb. Questions were supposed to have
answers, but there just wasn’t enough room in his head for answers to all those
things people like to ask him about, things he didn’t usually care about
anyway. Questions were for people with normal brains, for thinkers and
scholars. Not for somebody like Corny, whose brain was like a train running out
there where the tracks didn’t go. Where he was going now was to the Vinewood
train yard, where the tracks all went somewhere.

He loved trains. Even before his
accident he had loved them. Boxcars, flatcars, cabooses, the great and powerful
engines—he loved them all. But those awesome locomotives were the best and the
most mysterious. They had the power of dragons.
They pulled the train.
The engineers thought the power was theirs, but it was the big, sleek dragons
that did the magic and made the trains fly all over the land. And sometimes the
dragons broke free and really did fly. It was a flying dragon that killed
Corny’s dad. Big Bill Weehunt had been a railroad man all his working life, a
brakeman with cinders in his blood and diesel fumes in his lungs. He’d once
told his son that he had the best job in the world because they paid him to do
what he loved most—ride the rails. Then on a cold night in December of ’88, Big
Bill was killed when the dragon flew off the rails and took the train down the
side of a mountain. They called it a tragic derailment, but Corny knew it was
the mechanical dragon trying to fly that killed his dad, and that Big Bill
wouldn’t have wanted to die any other way.

He shuffled across quiet streets
where street lights were starting to come on, cut through yards without dogs,
ducked through a hole in a chain-link fence, went up the back alley and gave
wide berth to the sinkhole in Main Street. No way was he getting close to that
hole again and to that hungry darkness. He rounded the corner where City Drugs
flashed its electric signs, then crossed the gravel parking lot behind the line
of stores on Main Street and followed the footpath down the rocky embankment to
the train yard.

Otis Dellums was waiting for him at
the edge of the yard. He was crouched like a toad, watching a switch-engine
coupling a string of boxcars and digging his fingers into a small can of Vienna
sausages and fishing one out and shoving the whole thing in his mouth.

“Don’t ya ever get tired of them
thangs?” asked Corny as he hunkered down beside his friend and scratched an
itch in his armpit.

“Naw,” said Otis, chewing with his
mouth open and licking his fingers.

Corny reach over and pushed Otis’s
dirty ball cap down over his eyes.

“Don’t you get tired of doing
that?” Otis took off his hat and swatted Corny’s knee with it.

“Naw,” said Corny, grinning.

They both laughed. After a while,
Corny said, “Be great to hop in one of them boxcars and go somewheres.”

“Why don’t cha?”

“You come with me?”

“Naw, I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Why not?”

Otis shook his large head. “Don’t
know where they goin’. Might be to a bad place. Might get caught, too.”

“Somewhere where they ain’t got
them sausages.”

“Hah.” Otis ate the last one, then
tossed the can away. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere. You just talk.”

“Lots of men ride the rails. I
could do it too.”

“You ain’t no hobo.”

“No, but I could be.”

Otis lifted one cheek and farted.
Corny fanned his face. They both laughed. Corny said, “Wisht I
could
leave this town.”

“Why’s ’at?”

He shrugged. “Just wanna get away.
Too many spooky thangs goin’ on.”

“You scared of that hole, ain’t
ya?”

“Not just that. Other thangs too.”

“Like what?”

“Witches and such.”

“What witches?”

“Aw, forgit it. I ain’t hoppin’ no
train.”

“Just talkin’ out your hat,” Otis
said with a big, lopsided grin.

“You’re fartin’ out of yours.”

They laughed, then started
grappling with each other like playful pups. Though Otis was the bigger of the
two, he was less coordinated, and Corny easily pinned him to the ground. Otis
was no longer laughing. His eyes were big with fear. “Don’t hurt me, Corny. I
give.”

 “I ain’t gone hurt you.”

“Sometimes you do.”

Corny got off him and fell back on
the weedy ground. “That’s different. This ain’t like that. You ain’t got to be
scared of me.”

“You busted my lip that time. Looky
here.” Otis pinched his lower lip to show the scar marking the place where
Corny had kicked the can of sausages against his mouth. “Seeth?”

“Ain’t gone let me forgit it, are
ya?”

“Cain’t forgit it. You did it,
Corny.”

“Ain’t sayin’ I didn’t. I couldn’t
help it, though. Sometimes somethin’ comes over me and makes me do bad things.”

“’Cause o’ you fallin’ on your
head?”

“That’s right. Doctor said lots of
people with head injuries fly into rages for no reason.”

“Razors?”

“No. Rages. Like when you get real
mad and hurt somebody. But I take medicine for it now, so you ain’t got to
worry.”

“That’s good.”

A distant train whistle came out of
the night and sent a chill up Corny’s back. He stood, dusting off the seat of
his britches, and said, “Here comes one. Let’s get closer so we can get a good
look at it when it pulls in.”

Otis Dellums stood and followed his
friend onto the train-yard grounds.

The train whistle sounded again,
and its sad call was answered by incoherent whispering inside Corny’s head.
Whisperer was awake, but wasn’t making any sense.

Corny, with Otis in tow, walked as
close to the tracks as he dared. The ground shuddered with the approach of the
train. He tried to tune out the confused whispers buzzing in his head like a
nest of hornets. But Whisperer wouldn’t shut up.

***

Joe Rob stretched out on the bunk,
put his hands behind his head, stared up at the ceiling tiles and started
counting the little holes in them. “I’m a fucking jailbird,” he said to
himself, then laughed. The laugh rang shrilly against the cinderblock walls of
his cell, then escaped through the iron bars and echoed down the short hall to
the main room of the station house, where the night-shift cop sat behind his
desk. “Mookie fucking Vedders,” Joe Rob said softly. “If he’s such a hot-shit
lawyer, how come I’m locked up in here?” Joe Rob wasn’t in the habit of talking
aloud to himself, but he was still wound up from the drugs and the adrenaline
rush of the shootout. Besides, there was no one else to talk to in this cramped
cell.

He couldn’t really blame his lawyer,
though. The county homicide cop had talked to the County D.A. and the D.A. had
said, “Hold him overnight. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.” Vedders had
explained that the D.A. was just doing his job, and that he had to give his
investigators time to verify the facts of the case. “There’s a good chance they
could charge you with murder,” the lawyer explained. “But I’m confident no jury
would convict you, once the facts are know. You killed Odell Porch in
self-defense while trying to prevent the rape of an escaped mental patient. You
killed Odell’s brothers in self-defense while you were trying to rescue Skeeter
Partain. The physical evidence supports your story. We have the severed finger
and the threatening note directing you to the scene of the shootout. You didn’t
go to the police because you feared Skeeter would be killed if you did. Your
admitted drug use at the time of the shooting could be a problem. The lab
results will show, as you said, that you were under the influence of cocaine
and amphetamine, and that could go against you. It tarnishes your hero persona.
People, juries in particular, like their heroes squeaky clean. So we’ll have to
try to turn the drug use to our advantage. I want to go ahead and try to get
you into a drug treatment program. I think I can pull a few strings and get you
into Browner’s Hospital. It beats the hell out of the state facility and you’ll
be close to home.”

Mookie Vedders was sharp, no doubt
about it. Joe Rob liked the man’s supreme confidence and self-assured manner.
No, he couldn’t really blame the lawyer for his incarceration. But that son of
a bitch Luke Chaney had lied about not doing any jail time just to get Joe Rob
to surrender his guns. The lying pussy. Washed-up cop. He did blow Fate Porch’s
shit away, though, so you couldn’t call him chickenshit.
But I wanted to
kill the old man myself. Except for Chaney, I would’ve pitched a perfect game
and taken them all out myself. The dude spoiled my average.

He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t
start counting the holes in the ceiling tiles again. Even though the caged
light bulb in the ceiling washed the cell in harsh yellow light, Joe Rob felt
himself surrounded by deep darkness.