Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (21 page)

“Nothing. Just stay here with me
and keep quiet. If them cops find that head a’ boiling, we’ll be in a real bad
fix. Without the head of a conquered foe, I cain’t do my conjurin’.”

***

Joe Rob couldn’t get his mind
straight. When he tried to hold a thought in his head, it seemed to swirl away
like windblown smoke. He was groggy and he wondered if his jailors had slipped
drugs in his food or drink. The cement walls and iron bars of his cell
oppressed him, mocked him with harsh yellow light. It wasn’t supposed to be
like this. Somehow he’d lost something of himself in the dark chamber of sleep.
He was a soulless zombie in the waking world, and the core of his being was
still back there, lost in the darkness, lying dormant. The confinement was
slowly killing him. He had to get out, but his plan for escape hadn’t jelled.
He was at the mercy of his captors and that galled him.

He’d only picked at the scrambled
eggs and bacon and toast they’d served him and passed on the coffee. If they
were going to drug him some more, they’d have to come out in the open with it.

His lawyer visited him mid-morning.
Mookie Vedders told him that the county prosecutor was going to file charges
against him. Two counts of murder in the first degree. “As of now, it looks
like they aren’t going to charge you with a capital crime in the death of Odell
Porch,” said Vedders. “Skeeter backed up your claim of self-defense, so we can
concentrate on defending against the two murder counts. All in all, I think
we’re in pretty good shape. I’m working on having you transferred to Browner’s
for emergency treatment of drug abuse and for a complete psych evaluation. The
hospital will be a lot better than languishing in jail.”

Joe Rob stared at the floor.

“You hear what I just said?”

He nodded.

“Are you all right, Joe Rob?”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel right. Guess
I crashed pretty hard last night.”

“You want me to get a doctor to see
you?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s
anything a doctor can fix.”

“I’m going to have Dr. Jackson see
you. That all right with you?”

He leaned his back against the wall
behind the bunk. “Don’t matter.”

***

Ree Tyler came to the door and
tried to smile when she saw Luke, but the tears in her eyes betrayed her inner
turmoil.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, stepping
through the front door of her house.

“I don’t know. I...I saw
something...”

“Saw what?”

“Oh, it’s probably nothing. Just a
case of the middle-age crazies.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on in the kitchen. I’ll make
some more coffee.”

He followed her to the kitchen. “I
went by the shop and you weren’t there,” he said. “I thought maybe something
was wrong.”

She busied herself with the
coffeemaker. “Would it scare you off if I told you I sometimes have visions?”

“You couldn’t beat me off with a
stick.”

She forced a laugh. “It’s true.
It’s only happened once before, and it scared the hell out of me then, too.”

He sat at the kitchen table. “What
did you see?”

She sat opposite him. The coffee
machine began to make gurgling sounds.

“The first time was six years ago.
I was wide-awake, so I know it wasn’t a dream. Ben was at work and I stayed
home that day with a bad cold and a fever. I was sitting in the den, drinking
hot tea and all of a sudden these horrible images started coming to me. At
first I thought I was hallucinating because of the fever, even though my
temperature was just barely over a hundred. I closed my eyes and waited for the
images to go away, but they didn’t. They got more...intense. And more
frightening. I saw a man with a knife lurking in some bushes and he was
watching a woman in a green jogging suit running toward him. I knew he meant to
kill her.  And there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was just an observer.
I was there but not really
there
. Like watching a movie. But I knew this
was no movie. I had to watch as he jumped out of the bushes and took her down
and stabbed her over and over. All the blood. The terror in the poor girl’s
face. It was so intense! He killed her and I watched her die. Then he ripped
off her clothes and raped her. And I knew that’s why he killed her. So he could
have sex with her after she was dead. When he was done, he cut off her nipples
and I saw the tattoo on the back of his hand. A devil’s head in blue ink. Then
the images faded away. I couldn’t stop shaking for an hour. I didn’t know what
to make of it. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. But I couldn’t
get rid of the feeling that it hadn’t happened yet, that it was going to happen
in the near future. I told Ben about it when he got home that evening, and he
just pooh-poohed it and said it must’ve been like a fever dream or something.
I’d just about convinced myself he was right till I saw on the news the next
week that a woman jogger had been stabbed to death on a jogging trail near
Kennesaw, Georgia.”

“Jesus,” said Luke. “That’s spooky
as hell.”

“That’s not all. It gets spookier.
Against Ben’s wishes, I called the Cobb County Police and told a detective what
I’d seen in my vision and described the tattoo and the knife—it was a big buck
knife—and he thanked me very much and blew me off. Then the following week, he called
me back and told me they had a suspect in custody who had just confessed to the
murder and
that he had a blue-devil tattoo on his right hand
. The
detective said he’d never put much stock in psychic phenomena before but that
I’d made a believer out of him.”

Luke felt goose bumps crawl up the
back of his neck. “Okay. That was six years ago. What happened this morning?”  

Ree took a cigarette from her
little brown bag and lit it with a green lighter. She blew a bluish cloud of
smoke toward the ceiling. “I was putting on my makeup and having a second cup
of coffee when it happened again. This time, I recognized the location.” She
trembled and looked at Luke with pleading eyes. “My shop. I saw myself...hacked
with a machete.” She covered her face with her hands and shook, sobbing
soundlessly.

“Easy now,” Luke said as gently as
he knew how. “We won’t let anything happen to you.” He took the cigarette from
between her fingers and set it in the ashtray, then watched the smoke curling
up as Ree cried herself out.

She removed her hands from her face
and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put on such a show.”

“You needed to get it out. Did you
see who it was?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t see
his face. It was like I was looking over his shoulder while he was attacking
me. He was naked. He seemed familiar, but I can’t say who it was. It was eerie
as hell. Like I was out of my body, watching what was happening to me. I
couldn’t feel the knife blade going in, not physically, but...I don’t know...it
was like I could feel it in my soul. It was horrible.”

Luke remembered her guardian
angel’s warning to her that a darkness would
gather
him, and her too, if
she got too close. His imagination supplied an unwanted image of himself with a
blade, attacking Ree. Preposterous, he told himself. No way in the world could
that ever happen. But then why did he just now picture it?

“What?” she asked when she noted
his expression. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing, really. I was just
remembering Beau’s warning about me.”

“Don’t even think it. It wasn’t
you, silly. You couldn’t...”

“No, I couldn’t. But if I had
enemies who wanted to get at me through you...”

“Do you have enemies? Who would go
that far to hurt you?”

“Not that I know of. No one but old
lady Porch, and I can’t see her going at somebody with a machete. She’s got
relatives in Vidalia, but none with
cojones
that big. And anyway, nobody
knows about us.”

“Not yet. But they will.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t see each other.
For a while.”

“Luke, I’m not going to stop seeing
you because of a stupid vision. I’ll stop going to the shop before I do that.”

“Could you afford to close up shop
for a few weeks?”

She picked up the cigarette and
took a puff. “Not really. I don’t make a lot of profit, but without the income,
I couldn’t afford the overhead.”

“Is there somebody you could get to
run it for you for a while? At minimum wage?”

“No one I can think of.” She ground
out her smoke. “We shouldn’t overreact to this. I’ll just have to be—”

“I could do it. Run the shop for
you. Why not? I’m retired, remember? An old fart with time on his hands.”

“You would do that for me?” Her
eyes softened, shining with emotion.

“I’d do most anything for you,
Shorty.”

“I love you, Luke.” She reached
across the kitchen table and took both his hands in hers. “I really do.”

“Me too,” he said.

She made a sound that could’ve been
either a laugh or a sob. She stood and leaned across the table and kissed his
lips. “I didn’t know I could be this happy ever again.”

“Me either,” he said.

“Nothing can hurt me when I’m with
you. We could work together in the shop. I’ll teach you all about the antique
business. It’ll be fun.”

“Fun,” Luke said, smiling. He was
touched by her childlike enthusiasm and was glad to see her suddenly so happy,
but something—his innate pessimism?—told him that fun was not in the cards.

Thunder rolled and tumbled in from
the west. A sixth sense of his own intimated that the immediate future was
going to be as bleak as the dreary sky he saw through the kitchen window. 

The thunderclap rattled the
aluminum ladder Corny was standing on and made his heart leap for his throat.
He grabbed hold of the rung in front of his face and held tight until the
dizzying fear of falling passed.

“Lord, don’t let me get struck by
lightning,” he petitioned the great bearded Father who ruled heaven and earth
and tossed down lightning bolts the way kids chucked rocks. “I got to finish
cleaning out these gutters or Aunt Mattie’ll skin me for sure.”

With a wary glance to the
cloud-dark sky, he continued his climb and stopped when he reached the
corrugated gutter running the length of the side of the house. He’d already
cleaned the pine straw, dirt and leaves from the other gutters affixed to the
eaves of the roof, and he knew he couldn’t quit until the job was done. He
still remembered the two Golden Rules his father had drilled into him as a boy:
“A place for everything, and everything in its place,” and “If you do a job, do
it right. A half-assed job ain’t no job atall.” Corny didn’t know if it was
true that the dead watched over the living, the way some folks said, but if Big
Bill Weehunt
was
keeping an eye on him, he didn’t want to disappoint the
old railroad man, so he had to clean out this last stretch of gutter before the
storm hit.

“Hey, Cornelius?” a voice called
from a window below and to his right, and just for a piece of a second he
thought Whisperer was actually calling his name, but then he realized it was
Mr. Jones calling out to him from his bedroom window, so Corny answered, “Yeah,
it’s me, Mr. Jones.”

“Better get down off’n that ladder
’fore you get lightnin’-struck.”

“I will. I just got this last
gutter to do.”

“Your aunt told me to watch out for
you and I’ll not have her chewin’ on my hind end ’cause of you gettin’ kilt by
lightnin’.”

“No, sir, you ain’t gotta worry
’bout that. The storm’s still a ways off thataway,” he pointed toward the black
thunderheads in the western sky, “and I’ll be done before it gets here.”

    “Don’t say I didn’t warn ya,”
Mr. Jones grumbled, then slammed shut his window.

“Won’t be sayin’ nothin’ if
lightnin’ hits me,” he mumbled, then dug his fingers into the gutter and pulled
out a clump of damp pine straw interlaced with dead leaves, dropped it to the
ground below, then reached in for another handful of the mulchy crud.  A sharp
pain shot through the base of his thumb and he yowled like a whipped dog as he
jerked his hand out of the gutter. A big wasp was curled about his thumb, its
antennae twitching on its black head and its red body hanging on by the stinger
still embedded in his flesh. “Yeooow!” he cried and swatted the wasp with his
other hand. When he let go of the ladder to swat the wasp, he leaned back and
away from the ladder and the gutter in an instinctive reaction to get away from
the stinging pain, and now his shins were no longer braced against the ladder,
leaving him standing upright on the lower rung, teetering for balance. In the
time it took for his brain to receive the message that his body was losing its
equilibrium, the sensation of standing in mid-air made him forget all about the
wasp, and he windmilled his arms and grappled for the nearest ladder rung even
as he began to fall backward. A bright flash of light and another clap of
thunder accompanied his fall. And as he fell, he remembered clearly the
long-ago fall that had damaged his head and changed his life, and in an odd
way, the falling was comforting in its familiarity.

***

The police car followed the
coroner’s vehicle down the drive and onto the road. Agnes Porch sat in the old
armchair by the cold radiator, and Delbert stood at the window, his thick
forehead pressed to the glass.

“There goes the meat wagon,” he
said. “And the cops, too.”

Agnes grunted and continued to
finger the juju beads presented to her so long ago by Red Queen Rose.

 He ambled toward the bedroom door.

“Now you can tend to that head,”
she said. “I want it clean, Del.”   

“Wisht you’d tell me what you’re
gonna do with it.”

“You don’t need to know.”

He shrugged and walked out.

Agnes got up and moved slowly to
her cherrywood vanity and sat in front of the mirror. She removed the pins from
her braided crown of hair and uncoiled the long, rope-like tail of white, then
she set to work unbraiding it with her gnarled fingers, ignoring the arthritic
pain in the joints of her knuckles. It took a while to get it done, but that
was all right. She used the time to center herself, and the practiced activity
became a meditation.   When Del came back upstairs she was still brushing out
the dry fall of hair.

“I’m done,” he said, holding up the
white pillowslip containing the skull. “Gave me a case of the willies, but here
the damn thing is.”

“Thank you, Del. Just set it under
the bed and you can go.”

He did as told, then came over and
kissed her on the cheek. “Want me to come by later? Momma says you can stay
with us till you’re back on your feet.”

“Humph. Next time I leave here
they’ll be carrying me out feet-first.”

“Aw, don’t talk like that, Granny.
You still ’bout as spry as a spring chicken. And twice as feisty.”

She didn’t tell him that this was
likely the last time he would see her alive. She didn’t want to start him
blubbering all over her or to go home to tell Judy that she was fixing to die.
That wouldn’t do at all. She watched him lumber out of the room like an awkward
baby bear, and she stifled a brief impulse to shed a tear—not just for Del, but
for her whole family. The time for sentimentality was past. Now it was time to
use those darkest secrets whispered to her on that moonless night so long ago
by Red Queen Rose, the most powerful witch the Louisiana bayous had ever
spawned.

She got up, went to the four-poster
and retrieved the pillowslip from under the bed. She reached in and pulled out
the skull and held it in front of her eyes. “All right, Monroe Shockley,” she
addressed the head of bone, “one more task, then your soul can rest forever.”

The house shuddered under a boom of
thunder, and the lights flickered once, then went out. The afternoon had grown
as dark as night.

***

Alvin Snow ran a hand through his
sandy hair and ogled Holly Stimson’s backside as she bent over to get something
out of the filing cabinet. She had a nice ass for somebody who spent most of
the day sitting on it, he thought. Nice and tight and not spreading out with
age or with a dispatcher’s physical inactivity. He hitched up his gun belt and
turned away before she could turn around to catch him leering at her. He
decided she probably worked out during her off hours. Had to, to maintain that
shape.

“Alvin, did you check on the
prisoner?” Holly asked him when she saw him standing there with his hands on
his hips.

“Last time I looked, he was still
sawing logs.”

“What?”

“You know,
sleeping
.”

“He has to be checked every thirty
minutes, you know.”

Snow glanced at his Timex. “Why you
busting my balls, Holly?”

She cut her eyes at him. “Why do
you have a need to bring your genitalia into every conversation? Could it be
some sexual inadequacy you feel?”

“Jeez, now you’re really busting my
balls.” He grinned at her, then winked.

“You’re hopeless.”

“No ma’am. I’m still hoping. Hoping
you’ll see the errors of your ways and let me take you out.”

She slapped the folder down on the
desk and sat down, smoothing her skirt. “Go check the prisoner,” she said
sternly.

“Ooh, I love it when you boss me
around. I can picture you with a whip, all dressed in black leather.”

“Officer Snow,” said Holly,
reddening, “can you say
sexual harassment
?”

“Okay, okay, Just kidding. Don’t
have hissy fit.” He turned and walked down the short hallway leading to the
cell occupied by Joe Rob Campbell. Midway down the hall, Boots Birdwell was
wringing out his mop in an old metal bucket and humming a gospel-sounding tune.
The old black man looked up and said, “How do, Officer Al?”

“Hey, Boots. What’s that tune
you’re humming?”

“Didn’t know I was.” He flashed a
smile that made his eyes shine with warmth.

Boots was a retired railroad man
who stayed busy with part-time janitorial work and with his occasional
evangelical preaching at various black churches in Graves County. It was said
that he could electrify a congregation with his hellfire-and-brimstone rants
and fill a collection plate faster than any white preacher in the entire state.
Snow knew from past conversations with Boots Birdwell that the old man was as
sharp as a well-stropped razor and much too intelligent to waste his time with
menial labor, but Boots always said he enjoyed cleaning things up and making
them shine like a new silver dollar.

“How’s our boy?” Snow nodded toward
the only occupied cell.

Boots’s smile disappeared, and dark
lids hooded his eyes. “I’m afraid that boy’s lost in the wilderness.”

“Why do you say that?”

Boots leaned on his mop and lowered
his voice. “I can see it. Like a black cloud all around him. The boy’s a
troubled soul. And he ain’t by hisself.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, it’s what some folks over on
my side of town call bad juju. You know what that is?”

Snow, remembering an old blues
song, smiled and said, “I reckon that’s like when your mojo ain’t working.”

“Something like that,” said Boots.
“A juju’s a good luck charm for warding off evil and bad luck. If you got a
juju that don’t work, then you got no protection and bad luck will find you, so
when folks speak of bad juju, they generally mean evil’s crowding in and there
ain’t much to stop it. That’s bad juju. Like what the hippies used to call bad
vibes. Folks on my side of town are saying there’s a whole lot of bad juju
hereabouts.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I know there’s evil in the world.
Always has been. Demons, elementals, dark gods and such. Nowadays, folks put it
all off on Satan, but Satan’s just a fallen angel who rebelled against God.
There’s things worse than the devil, and older too, meaning they been around
long enough to sink deep roots. Being a Christian, I have to believe that faith
in the Lord is the only true salvation. But I know there’s older religions with
different outlooks on things. My great aunt was a healer, a root doctor, and
when she became a Christian she didn’t give up all her old pagan ways, no sir.
She prayed in Christ’s name and used her healing herbs in His name. But the old
magic never died out. That’s the way folks are. They say they believe one way
but they stick with what they know and what works for them. Plenty of good
Christians still knock wood for good luck or throw spilled salt over their
shoulder. You see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I think so,” said Snow.

“I’m saying the old ways are still
with us, even in these days of cell phones and computers.  And so are the old
gods and elemental forces. Sometimes those ancient evils reach out and touch us
and remind us that we’re all just children in the wilderness. Frail lights in
the darkness. And I think maybe that boy there’s been touched by that dark, and
now he’s lost in it.”

Snow felt a chill. “That’s sure
nuff some scary stuff, Boots. You ’bout convinced me to go to church in the
morning.”

The old man smiled. “May the Lord
bless you and keep you, Officer Al.”

A loud peal of thunder made Snow
flinch. He shook his head, then said, “Thank you, Boots. I reckon I need all
the blessing I can get.”

Boots Birdwell nodded and rolled
his bucket of soapy water down the hall. Snow went the other way to check on
the young man in the last cell.

“Joe Rob?” he called.

Joe Rob didn’t respond. He was
stretched out on the bunk, eyes closed and hands folded across his belly in the
posture of a man in a coffin. Snow called out again, louder. Still no response.
He leaned close to the iron bars and looked closely to see if the boy’s chest
was moving.
Christ, is he breathing?
“Hey!” he shouted. Nothing. He
moved quickly down the hall, slipped on the wet floor but kept his balance with
a quick-step shuffle, then went to the office to get the key to the cell from
the dispatcher’s desk drawer.

“What’s wrong?” Holly asked him.

“He’s unresponsive. I wanna see if
he’s playing possum or if something’s really wrong with him.”

“I’ll come with you,” she said. It
was standard procedure for there to be no fewer than two officers present
whenever an occupied cell was opened, and Alvin and Holly were the only
staffers at the station just then.

“Watch your step,” Snow said as he
led the way down the hall. “Floor’s wet.”

He jammed the key into the lock,
turned it and pulled the cell door open, then entered the cramped space. Holly
stood behind him, holding the baton she’d grabbed off a hook in the office. She
had been trained to subdue a prisoner with the non-lethal use of the baton, but
she’ never had to use it on a real-life prisoner or detainee.

“Lock it back,” she blurted.

“What?”

“Your gun.”

“Oh. Shit.” Snow slammed the cell
door and locked it. He’d forgotten to remove his weapon before entering the
cell. Chief Keller would have his ass if he found out one of his troops broke
that
cardinal rule. He hustled down the hall to the office, put his pistol in a
drawer, then dashed back to the cell, where Holly stood with her baton at the
ready. He reopened the cell door and stepped inside.

“Joe Rob?” he said, standing over
the prisoner’s bunk. The boy didn’t respond. Not even a flutter of eyelids. He
reached down on shook the boy’s shoulder.