Eyes of the Predator (13 page)

The only relationship in Lylee’s
life was with his mother, who became increasingly possessive with age and the
bareness of her own life. Relationship was, in reality, a stretch in describing
the interaction between mother and son. She doted on him and demanded a level
of affection in return that he was not able to provide, nor inclined to return.
For his part, he tolerated the woman who had given him birth, but just barely.
Eventually, he left for good. Some said that it was his mother’s possessive
clinging that had driven him away. Most people just knew that Lylee was
destined to leave, and if he never came back, so much the better. He was a
creepy kid anyway.

It was, perhaps,
self-preservation and not an actual awareness that pushed him finally out of
the front door and as far away from his mother’s presence as he could get. The
solitary young man put himself through technical school, studying computer
programming. It was a vocation ideally suited to him, requiring minimal
interaction with other persons, and then only about the technical aspects of
programming. Hovering over a keyboard inputting code, required no unwanted interaction
or office bullshitting with co-workers. As long as he did his job, his employer
was happy. The fact that he was an almost anonymous employee to even his
closest supervisor was actually a benefit from a management perspective. He
required little of their management time, never complained, and worked well
without requiring much supervision. They cared not at all about his activities
outside of work.

Visits to his mother became
exceedingly rare, and when he did visit, there was nothing to say. She chattered
as always about her little Lylee who had come to visit. It was a fantasy. He
knew that he had never been the cute, bubbly boy she babbled on about, and they
had never been the happy family she portrayed them to be in her rambling
monologues while he sat with a glass of cold lemonade dripping in the humid air
over his fingers and onto his lap. He made the visits because it seemed that
was what he was expected to do, although not sure who it was that expected it
of him or why he cared.

And that thought became the
moment of awakening for him. Why should he care? He didn’t care. Somewhere deep
in his psyche, awareness grew that he need only do what
he
wanted. It
was a liberating concept for Lylee, and eventually the visits home ended. He
was liberated by the isolation in his life and separation from the shreds of
family memory that only barely existed at best. It was freedom to him, and the
power he felt within grew as his separation and distance from the rest of the
world increased.

At the age of fifty-six, his
mother followed her husband to an early grave, probably feeling much the same
isolation and desperation he had felt. The loss of her Lylee had been too much.
She died alone and unremembered by her only son, her Lylee.

Now, he lived invisibly and alone.
His isolation brought him security and freedom from the world, and with that
freedom, came great power. And the power brought him…everything.

 Invisible and solitary, it
grew within, the power. It raged and roared to be unleashed. And then one day, he
opened the door.

Instinctively, he became the
hunter. The truth is that his family life probably had little causative effect
on what he had become. It was coded deep in his genes. The sad and pathetic
childhood he had endured, the absence of a strong fatherly influence, and the
cloying possessive nature of the relationship with his mother only made it
easier to transform into his true nature. It would have happened, sooner or
later.

With the transformation, the
world jumped into focus for him. A different light shone around him. Invisible
to others, it illuminated the world around him differently than the normal
light that others used to discern their surroundings. Becoming the predator,
his view of his surroundings and perception of others evolved into something
not human. He learned the techniques of preying on the weak and the unaware.
His runarounds were training exercises that honed his predatory skills. His
power increased with each hunt.

The pain he inflicted on his
victims was important only because it brought him greater power. He felt no
more for them than a coyote does for the jackrabbit in its jaws. A true
sociopath, it was right because it was good for him. That was enough.

George Mackey dropped his Sam
Brown belt with its gear on the weathered boards and plopped his ass down into
a porch chair. Flipping up the lid of the scuffed and ever-present cooler, he
grabbed a beer, popped the seal on the can, and held it to his lips for a long
pull with his head tilted back.

“Little early, ain’t it?” The old
man came walking around the side of the house and slowly took the three steps
up to the porch, holding the handrail. The morning was turning hot, and on
reaching the porch, he stopped and wiped the inside of his hat with a dirty handkerchief,
then set the straw, wide brimmed hat back on his head.

“Had a long night,” George
replied taking another sip from the can.

The old man nodded and eased
himself slowly into the other porch chair. They were really kitchen chairs that
had become porch chairs when they had been dragged outside sometime in the
past, long before George had taken up residence at Fel Tobin’s place.

“Believe I’ll join you.” Tobin
reached into the cooler and pulled out a beer for himself. By mutual, unspoken
agreement, the cooler was always between the two porch chairs and was
absolutely never empty. Both men threw the beer contributions in when it got
low and added ice periodically.

George had come across the old
man while looking for a place to stay during a drawn out and messy divorce. His
friends all told him that divorce was an occupational hazard in law
enforcement, even for deputies in a rural Georgia county. He had a different
theory. His ex-wife, Darlene, hated him. It was a theory, elegant in its
simplicity that seemed reasonably sound.

He admitted that she probably had
good reasons. The list included her husband’s good old boy, country ways,
always worrying about the next paycheck and which bills to pay, the small,
plain house they would probably spend the rest of their lives in, and the fact
that Pickham County was what it was. Darlene wanted more, and after the new had
worn off their marriage, she had filed for divorce. To her credit, it had taken
ten years and two daughters to bring her to that point. In the end, it all
boiled down to the same thing. She hated the life they had led while they were
married, which meant that by default she hated him. At least, that’s how George
saw it.

He had asked her once during the
fighting why she hated him so much. The question had made her catch her breath.
After a few seconds of silence, she had looked him in the eye and said,
“Because you’re late, George. You are always late. Late to pay the bills. Late
to come home. Late to make sergeant at the Sheriff’s Department. Late to apply
for the Patrol. You were even late for the births of our daughters, busy with
something or other in the county, but late just the same.” She had taken a
breath and ended with finality, “Late, George. You are always late and always
will be.”

For his part, George had quietly
signed the papers and given her everything she wanted, which was everything. It
didn’t matter. It was the price of peace, and it was worth it.

He understood. It was true. He
was always late. Late to be what she needed and to give her what she wanted.
Darlene had remarried a year later to a man who was a supervisor at a paper
mill plant out on the Georgia coast, and who was never late. George had found
old Fel Tobin. It was a good trade to his way of thinking.

The day he had moved out of the
house, he had gone to the grocery store bulletin board in Everett, the county
seat. Everything was advertised there, free of charge. A card with a telephone
number had the words ‘Room to Rent’ printed in pencil in large block letters.
As it turned out, it was two rooms and a small bathroom over an old barn. He
went to the location and found an old man riding randomly around on a lawn
mower, not really mowing anything in particular. It was a quick deal. George
looked around and handed old Fel Tobin some cash, and it was done.

“So. You gonna say anything about
it?”

“What? Oh, the night.” George
sipped his beer. “Had a stabbing last night. Old man was stabbed in the A.M.E.
church parking lot out on Jax Highway. He’s dead.”

“The hell you say. Stabbed dead
in a church parking lot? The hell you say.”

“Yep. He’s dead, and we don’t
know who did it, but it was a real bad person.”

“Well, it would have to be a bad
person to stab someone to death in a churchyard.”

“It’s more than that. Person who
did this, did it to cause a lot of pain.”

“Oh,” Fel thought this over a
bit, sipping his beer. “Who was it?”

“Don’t know. We’re looking for
him now, but not much to go on.”

“I mean the person that got
stabbed. Who was it?”

“Oh,” George said trying to shake
out the memory of Mrs. Sims pointing at him and admonishing him to catch the
person who took her husband. “Harold Sims. He and his wife live over on Power
Line Road.”

“I know Harry. Bought a hog from
him once. Damn, stabbed in a churchyard.” He sipped his beer again and then
repeated for emphasis, “Damn. You sure he’s dead?”

“He’s dead.”

“Damn. Harry Sims stabbed dead in
a churchyard. Damn.”

“Yeah,” George nodded in
agreement and sipped his beer.

Minutes ticked quietly by, broken
only by the sound of George retrieving another beer and popping the top.
Although still morning, the day was heating up, and the heat filled the air
with the rich aroma of green living things. Grasshoppers buzzed around in the
scalped grass that Fel never stopped mowing. A bluebird darted to the grass
from its concealment in a forsythia and impaled a grasshopper, darting quickly
back to its perch.

The two spent a lot of time on
the porch. Cold, sweating beer cans in hand, they might not say much, just
sitting there in the humid evening, watching the twilight and then full night
coming on. To say that they sat there contemplating the meaning of life would
have been too grand a description. Usually, they just sat watching drops of
water slide down the cold cans and drip onto the dusty planks of the porch,
considering the puzzle of life. Sometimes it seemed that the puzzle pieces were
pushed around and forced together, causing the picture to warp and buckle.

George stood up and tossed the
empty can into the old wooden crate by the front door. It clanked against the
fifty or so others that had been deposited inside. He picked the Sam Brown belt
up off the porch and slung it over his shoulder, the handcuffs and keys
jingling, and the pistol thumping him in the side.

“Well, guess I’ll turn in,” he said
starting down the creaking steps. “You mowin’ today?” He threw the question
back over his shoulder, knowing the answer.

“Yep. Just like always.”

George nodded and walked around
the side of the house and across the yard towards the barn where his apartment
was. An acorn thumped onto the hood of his county pickup parked under an old
oak. As he climbed the steps outside to the second floor of the barn, the sound
of Fel’s lawn mower sputtering and then roaring to life filled the air. George
knew he would spend the morning mowing before the day got too hot.

It all seemed so natural. The
acorn dropping, the grasshoppers in the grass, the bluebird in the forsythia,
the smell of the vegetation, the noise of the mower. How could those things
exist in the same world as the dark stain in the gravel and dust of the church
parking lot, and the old woman’s brown, weathered hand pointing at him. “You
catch him Deputy. You catch the person.”

It was too complicated for
George, and he was too tired to think about it. He hoped he would sleep.

The glow of the Savannah city
lights ahead had been slowly overpowered by the sun rising to the east over the
Atlantic. Cy wondered how breakfast at the I-95 Diner had led to this. Dropping
the girl off at the truck stop seemed a simple task, but it had the feel of
something different, and he wasn’t sure what. It was something just beyond his
ability to discern and understand. It was clear that Clay felt it too, and was
being taken in; maybe sucked into a situation they were happily ignorant of
just a couple of hours earlier. As the light coming in from the east was
changing the way things looked over the Georgia countryside, things for the
brothers looked different than they had just a few hours before. Cy was not happy
about it.

Up ahead a large sign lit in red,
white, and blue letters said ‘AcrossAmerica’. Cy took the exit, turned right
and then left across the road into the lot. The old pick up bumped over
potholes and gravel at the entrance torn up by the heavy truck traffic. The
truck stop located on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia was a hive of
activity. To one side there were big rigs fueling at the wide lanes around the
diesel pumps. On the other side of the main building were gas pumps for cars
and smaller trucks. The smell of diesel fuel and exhaust hovered in the air.
Air brakes hissed, engines rumbled to life, and transmissions shifted quickly
through the lower gears as trucks flowed back towards the interstate and the
river of traffic that passed north and south along I-95 and to the west on I-16
towards Atlanta.

This was a full service truck
stop, which meant that truckers could have their rigs serviced, take a shower,
relax in the lounge, or play video games or pool while they waited for their
next load. A small, attached motel offered cheap rooms for those who had had
enough of the cab sleepers in their trucks or for those whose cabs did not have
sleepers. Services included a diner, general store, and a gift shop. A few
older couples who had stopped for a meal or to gas their motor homes wandered
uncertainly across the lot from the pumps to the store. They looked out of
place in the midst of the truckers.