Eyes of the Predator (2 page)

The girl’s bedroom had a small
window in it, with glass. The wood frame around the glass was old and
dry-rotted, and the glazing was falling out from around the glass panes. As the
wind blew, the glass rattled in the weathered wood frames. It was an empty,
hollow sound echoing in the room and then out into the bleak night.

Headlights from her father’s
pickup cast a moving patch of light across the wall of her dark room. The
lights went out, and she heard the door of the old truck squeak and slam. Like
everything else around the place, it was worn out. The truck was tired. The
land was tired. The old house was tired. She was tired.

The dog her father kept, it had
no name, barked as her father walked towards the house. It yelped suddenly, and
she knew that he had taken a kick in the side for the bark. He was a stupid
dog. He always barked and Daddy always kicked him. You would think he would
learn. Maybe he was just tired too, hoping in his old dog way that tonight
might be different from every other night.

Stupid dog. Tonight
would be
like
every other night.

There was silence and the girl,
Lyn, knew that her father had stopped to take a piss on her mother’s withered,
scrawny rosebush beside the front porch. In her mind, she could see her father
lean back, taking a long pull from a beer can, with his privates hanging out
spattering pee on the poor rosebush and the porch.

There in her dark room, a look of
weary disgust crossed her face. It wasn’t the peeing outside that bothered her.
This was rural farm country, and like as not, everyone did that. She had even
been known to squat behind a bush when out and about.

No, it wasn’t his peeing outside
that bothered her; it was the meanness of the act, the way her father did it,
peeing on a rose that her Mama had dug the hole for and watered everyday
throughout the summer, rinsing the spattered piss off every morning. It was his
challenge to them. He might be a nothing dirt farmer and day laborer, but when
he was here, by God, he was the king—the boss—and they better not forget it.
Fuck the rosebush and what it represented; the wishful hope of something
better, something pretty and soft, something different from the hardscrabble,
mean life that he gave his wife and children. “Roses my ass,” he would mutter
as he shook off the last drops of piss. “I got your roses right here.”

He waited patiently, a lion in
the grass at the edge of the herd. The herd grazed and moved around him and
copulated and birthed and played and fought, and was completely unaware of his
presence.

When the moment came, he would
spring into relentless, merciless, brutal action. He would be filled. For his
prey, it would be terrible.

After a long time, his eyes moved
again. She emerged from the bowels of the mall through the bank of double glass
doors she had entered an hour earlier. Others passed her going in and coming
out. They took no notice of the girl, nor she of them. He noticed them all,
alert for any sign that he might lose his prey to some chance encounter she
might have.

Moving from one circle of light thrown
off by the streetlights to the next, she was careful to stay out of the
shadows, as a young girl alone should be. It would not help her.

Coming to the pole beneath which
her car was parked, she opened the car door, threw the small bag she now
carried into the back seat, and slid behind the steering wheel. A moment later,
the car started and the headlights came on. It backed slowly from the space. He
could see her twisting in the seat to peer around a truck parked next to her,
making sure the way was clear. Careful and attentive to her driving, she was
completely oblivious to his presence.

He was unknown and unseen, and
she was just one small part, an insignificant member, of the herd flowing
through the parking lot and into and out of the mall. Her insignificance made
her vulnerable.

They would not be there when she
cried out in agony and terror, but they would become aware of her absence,
eventually. There would be a search. The herd would ripple with fear, and at
the same time, sigh deeply with relief that they had not been the ones taken.
Soon the predator and the prey would be forgotten, and the herd would return to
its random, frenetic movement grateful that they had not been seen by the
predator. What they would not comprehend was that, in fact, they were seen.
They had not been selected. That was the difference, the only difference.

George Mackey rolled his window
down in the cool night air and shot a quick stream of tobacco juice between his
teeth and out into the dark. The wind from the county sheriff’s pickup rushing
through the night air caused the mix of spittle and tobacco juice to spray back
against the door and side of the truck. In the light of day, it shown as a
brownish dried stain covering the door and side and was a matter of some
discussion and disgust by other deputies who refused to retrieve any item from
Mackey’s vehicle by going through the driver’s door. They were not about to
touch the brown stained door handle.

The interior of the pickup’s cab
was a different matter. It was neat and organized. Deputy Mackey kept a small
briefcase with reports, pens, flashlight, notepads, extra handcuffs, extra
ammunition for his Beretta Model 92F military version nine millimeter pistol,
and other essential items seat-belted in on the passenger seat. These were his
tools, and even though some of Deputy Mackey’s personal habits were suspect,
even ridiculed by his peers, his law enforcement instincts and abilities were
not. Like any good tradesman, he kept his tools clean and in order.

In fact, his only real detractor
was the person ultimately responsible for his continued presence with the
sheriff’s department. Pickham County Sheriff, Richard Klineman, himself had
taken a disliking to Deputy Mackey. Retired from a big-city police department,
and resettling in rural Georgia, he had felt it his civic duty to run for
sheriff so that he might bring enlightened law enforcement to his rustic and
clearly unsophisticated neighbors. Klineman had convinced a wealthy and
politically connected county commission chairman to support him as a
progressive who would usher the County sheriff’s office into the twenty-first
century. Old-timers and old money had bought into the idea, mostly because the
sitting sheriff had been a non-political straight arrow unwilling to grant
favors to the good ole boys. Klineman, an outsider, but willing to play the
game with them, won in a close election.

Not too much had changed under
Sheriff Klineman. As it turned out, Mackey and the other Pickham County
deputies were pretty good at their jobs and as dedicated as their seasoned,
big-city detective cousins; maybe more so, since most of them had lived in
Pickham County all of their lives. It was their county.

So the deputies patiently worked their jobs, attended to
their duties, and waited. Sheriffs were elected. They came and they went. The
deputies
would bide their time until the political tides would sweep
Klineman out of their lives and bring in the next candidate.

Frustrated, Sheriff Klineman’s
cleanup of the county was mostly aimed at George Mackey and the few other
deputies like him. The reason wasn’t entirely clear to the deputies. They
worked hard, solved cases and helped out around the county. No one really
complained about them. They were pretty much just average members of the
community who happened to be deputies.

And, in fact, that was the
problem, although George and his fellow deputies did not understand it. They
were like the rest of the community. Country. Rednecks. Simple. In Sheriff
Klineman’s eyes, they were hicks. Their general lack of sophistication was
embarrassing to him. Tobacco-spitting, good ole boys in scuffed boots could not
be true law enforcement professionals. He was going to change things.

But on this clear autumn night,
the world seemed right to George Mackey and worries about his sheriff were far
from his mind as he whipped the county pickup into the gravel lot of an old
country store–gas station. The building was an old frame structure with faded
white paint on the wood siding. It had been standing since the 1920’s and had
been operated by a succession of owners. Some had made a go of it, some had
not. It had sat empty for a number of years before the current owners bought it
as a family retirement business. They were making a go of it, sort of. The fact
that old man Cutchins and his wife were retired and had most everything paid
off made it a little easier for them; otherwise, their continued occupation of
the old building would be a doubtful thing.

The Cutchins place was one of a
number of small isolated establishments scattered around the county. George
usually tried to stop by and check on the secluded businesses around closing
time. Half way through his twelve-hour shift, the visits to the isolated stores
broke up the monotony of the night.

From his pickup, he could see
short, white-haired Mrs. Cutchins standing behind the counter counting out a
stack of bills. Two local boys, sixteen or seventeen years old, were standing
outside beside a beat up old farm truck watching through the window. One nudged
the other as they muttered back and forth.

George stepped out onto the
gravel, closing the door loudly. The boys’ heads snapped around in unison while
their arms dropped to their sides in an effort to conceal the cans they were
holding behind their legs.

“How you boys doin’ tonight?”
George’s tone was firm, the look on his face a stern warning to the young men.

“P-pretty good Deputy,” one
stammered.

The other just nodded.

“Well, looks like they’re closing
up. You boys head out.”

“Yes, sir. Guess so. See you
later Deputy,” The one who was the talker lead the way as they both climbed
into the pickup, still trying to hide the cans.

“Boys,” George said, “Pour out
the beers before you crank up the truck.”

“Oh…uh yes, sir.” Talking boy
looked over at the  passenger side. “Better pour it out, Bobby.”

Beer poured foaming into the
gravel from the windows of the truck.

“All right now,” George
continued. “Head on out. I catch you drinking again tonight, and I’ll be
hauling you down to the county jail before I call your daddy. Right?”

Talking boy nodded solemnly,
indicating his complete appreciation of the situation. “Yes, sir. We didn’t
mean any harm…I mean we’d appreciate you not calling our folks.”

“That’s up to you. Now ya’ll head
out.” They both nodded. Talking boy cranked the old truck and pulled out onto
the country road. He was careful not to spin his tires in the gravel, and
accelerated on the road like a grandmother going to Wednesday night prayer
meeting, causing a small smile to break across Deputy Mackey’s stern face.

It wasn’t the beer either that
bothered Lyn. Even in the backwoods Bible belt, everybody drank. It was natural
enough to look for a way to sooth the pain of poverty and ignorance. A beer, or
even many beers, was one way to make the emptiness tolerable.

Her friends’ fathers drank. They
were still good fathers and husbands. If hate was in their hearts, it was for
themselves. They hated their failure and not being able to do better for their
families, so they drank. Too simple and plain to put into words what they felt,
they were still tender with their families in their own way.

Not Daddy though. It was not the
poverty or the backbreaking labor. It was them. He hated them. She knew it.

He wanted nothing more than to
torment his family. He was mean and ignorant and seemed to take pleasure in his
own ignorance.

“I ain’t never been more than
fifty miles from Judges Creek in Pickham County, Georgia,” he was wont to say
with some pride.

“This here was good enough for my
daddy, and I guess it’ll be good enough for you,” he would go on, the words
spit out like a threat, warning her not to consider even the possibility of
ever having more or wanting more out of life.

Her brother, Sam, had not been
able to take it any longer than he had to. When he turned eighteen, he went to
Savannah and joined the Army. He never said goodbye to his father, but he had
taken Lyn aside one day and told her of his plan to leave. They had cried and
hugged each other, Lyn clinging to her brother for a long while. She had known
he would leave one day, had dreaded that day, but knew that he had to. Staying,
he would have killed Daddy, or been killed by him.

 They sat for a long while
that day laughing a little about the plan they had when they were younger to
run away to Canada, to get away from the meanness of their father and their
lives. It was a child’s dream, dreamt by children whose childhood bore the
scars of abuse. Sam promised to come back and get her when he could. They would
go to Canada. It had become her dream of dreams. Cool, green Canada.

That was two years ago. Sam was
buried now, behind the old Pentecostal church in Judges Creek. He had come home
a year ago after a bomb alongside a dirt road in Afghanistan had blown up the
Humvee he was riding in. Lyn had no idea what a Humvee was, but she knew that
the driver of the vehicle lost his legs. Sam lost his life.

The few letters he had written to
his sister were hidden in a box under her bed. She kept them hidden from her
father for fear that they would disappear during one of his drunken rages. She
didn’t blame Sam for leaving, but she missed him badly.

Mama missed him too. Lyn knew
that she cried at night over the loss of her only boy. She also knew that Daddy
thought it was because of his meanness that Mama cried, and took pleasure in
that idea.