Eyes of the Predator (6 page)

Somewhere a door had banged shut.
It was a muffled sound and seemed a long ways off. Swiveling his head, the gray
eyes scanned methodically in all directions. No light. No movement. But the
sound had been unmistakable.

Roughly but silently, he pulled
the cut clothing up around her waist and pushed the terrified girl into the
car, binding her once again to the seat frame. His fingers left purple bruises
on her arms. Putting his finger to his lips, he leaned close.

 “No sound,” he whispered.
“No movement.”

He stared at her with his
eyebrows raised expectantly until she nodded her understanding.

Quietly and carefully, he moved
into the woods.

The dim, yellow beam of the
flashlight emerged from the woods, wavering from the shuffling gait of the
person holding it. The beam swung widely back and forth, as if searching for
danger, but not truly expecting any. The dim light detected no trace of the man
in the woods. He was invisible to the person holding the light, and would have
been difficult to see in broad daylight.

He watched as the yellowish beam
from the flashlight made its way around the church. The person holding it
shuffled to the woods, and for a moment, it seemed it would disappear into the
dark trees. But then it hesitated and swung in the direction of the car. After
a minute the light bounced slowly up and down moving deliberately towards the old
car and the unseen man in the woods.

Avoiding directly looking into
the light, he allowed his night vision to give him a picture of the intruder.
The silhouette and shuffling gait were that of an old man. An animal growl grew
inside him. Outside there was only deadly silence.

Approaching closer, the old man
shined the light through the windshield. There was nothing visible. Stepping up
to the old car, he bent over with the light to peer inside. ‘Reckon what the
car’s problem is,’ he thought, unconcerned. The danger so close raised no
hackles on is neck, no psychic warning, or premonition from the Almighty. It
was just an old, empty car in a parking lot.

 A startled breath escaped
him, and he almost jumped back.

The girl, bent over sideways so
that her head was below the window, had her hands tied and bound with something
he could not make out. There was duct tape around her mouth. It was like
something from a movie, and in the few seconds it had taken to approach the car
and see what was inside, the old man really and truly wished he had let the old
woman call the sheriff. He very much wanted to be on the porch of his house
waiting for a deputy to come shine his lights around and make things right with
the bright spotlights and not this dim little flashlight. What had he gotten
into? It was less than a second before he discovered the answer.

He raised the light slightly, and
the girl’s eyes widened. It wasn’t the light that seemed to frighten her. The
eyes were focused on something…behind him.

Instinctively the hand not
holding the flashlight started to move backwards towards the pistol in his
pocket. It was too late.

Searing pain burned through his
right kidney. Piercing the old man’s body to the hilt, the knife’s eight-inch
blade penetrated completely through his thin frame, nearly protruding from his
abdomen.

With his arm around the old man’s
neck and mouth, he worked the blade back and forth, in and out, as the frail
old body quivered at the pain and the shock of the knife’s movements through
his flesh and organs. A high-pitched wheezing sound escaped from his lungs
followed by a gurgling, rattling sound. The attack was too sudden for him to
struggle, and the placement of the blade was expert enough to be a death blow.
Not a quick merciful death, but death nonetheless.

After a minute, the quivering and
feeble struggle ended. The old man’s body crumpled to the gravel. Blood oozing
from the wound thickened in the sand mixed with the gravel.

The attacker stepped back and
examined his work. Unexpected, he thought. Unexpected, but not unpleasant. It
was a bonus, and he smiled at that.

He retrieved the small pistol
from the old man’s back pocket. He had felt it as he leaned closely, almost
intimately, into him during the attack.

The girl looking up from the seat
of the car could see him, although she could no longer see the old man who had
peered into the car a few moments ago. Their eyes met, and the terror reflected
back at him from the girl’s eyes brought another surge of fulfillment to him.

Tears fell from her eyes but did
not touch her cheek. They dripped, slowly at first, and then more rapidly
across the duct tape covering her mouth and face until they plopped onto the
car’s seat. He found this somehow exciting. The only thing she could produce
now was tears, and she was even denied the sensation of feeling them course
wetly across her face. They rolled from her eyes to the duct tape to the seat,
and she was denied the wet, weeping release of crying. The thought made him
feel more powerful.

Opening the car door, he plopped
loosely into the driver’s seat and let the door slam shut. The engine started
smoothly, and he pulled slowly around the church with the headlights off.
Stopping by the road for a moment, he made sure there was no car approaching
from either direction. He pulled onto the black two lane, headed for the
interstate.

*******

The old woman on the porch lifted
her head. The sound of the closing car door came muffled, but discernible
through the hundred yards of black woods.

“Harry, is that you?” She knew
her frail voice would not carry the woods.

Silently, hands folded in her lap
she waited, peering into the dark woods at the edge of the lot of the home she
had shared with her husband for sixty years. He would be back soon. ‘The old
fool’, she thought.

*******

She was bound again to the seat
frame. Her eyes had the look. He had seen it many times before. The look
pleaded with him to drop her off now as he had promised. It was pathetic and
stupid.

She had just witnessed the murder
of the old man, someone who might have been able to help her. Could she truly
believe that he would keep his word and release her, as if he had ever intended
to do so? The need to survive, the longing desire for her life not to end
overpowered her reason. It made her hope for the absurd, her personal survival.
Somewhere inside, the synapses of her brain fired electric impulses that shut
down reason and made the hope for survival her reality. Her desperation to
survive made the absurdity of her circumstance invisible to her.

Pathetic and stupid. And it
thrilled him. The terrified, begging look in her eyes. It was the same look he
had observed once watching a documentary show on African wildlife. The gazelle,
hanging from a leopard’s jaws, stunned and crazed with fear, eyes wide open,
had that same pleading look. The animal was still alive, legs trying to run and
twitching in the cat’s mouth. Not dead…yet.

The car’s taillights disappeared.
At the edge of the lot where the trees bordered the gravel, the thin, frail
form of the old man quickly bled out into the dust. The few remaining years of
life that he had possessed had been stolen from him by the predator. The cold
steel of the knife burning hotly as it sliced through kidneys, arteries, and
organs had torn the life from him.

*******

In a supermarket parking lot,
some miles away across the Florida state line, ice cream melted in a plastic
bag on the seat of a small Japanese car.

A tunnel of dark green embraced
the truck. The headlights cast a long beam of light down the tunnel of trees so
that leaves and grass swirled in kaleidoscope patterns where the light
illuminated. Beyond the shoulders of the road, little could be seen The heavy,
humid aromas of the vegetation blew rushing through the interior. He savored
the smell, rich and pungent.

He loved this time of night. Mist
rose from the creeks and depressions in the ground. Unseen life moved, chirped,
and scurried everywhere. It could be heard even through the rushing noise of
the pickup.

George turned his head and spat a
stream of tobacco juice, some of which actually made it beyond the door of the
truck to hit the road with a splat. Squatting on the centerline, a lizard
dodged the brown liquid as the pickup rushed by with a muffled roar.
Undeterred, the small green reptile darted to the shoulder and the safety of
the brush.

The radio crackled and spoke in a
tinny female voice.

“302. Meet a woman at 715 Power
Line Road in reference to a missing person, her husband. Subject is a black
male, five feet, eight inches, thin build, seventy-nine years of age.”

“10-4 Dispatch,” another tinny
voice, this one male, responded.

Located in southeastern Georgia,
the I-95 corridor cut across the eastern edge of Pickham County. Most of the
businesses and developed areas were along the interstate’s path. The remainder
of the county was primarily agricultural. Farms and small settlements dotted
the landscape, with the occasional country store or tractor supply business
located at a crossroad to provide service to the locals.

During the day and evening shifts
at the Sheriff’s Department there were three or four sheriff’s units working
the county. Those working the day shift were numbered 101 through 104. Evening
shift units were 201 through 204, and so on. On third shift, George’s shift,
they called it Morning Watch; there were never more than two units working, and
some nights, only one. Morning Watch deputies had to possess a high degree of
self-reliance. Back up could be a long ways off, as much as an hour away. It
depended on what the Georgia State Patrol troopers were doing, what section of
the interstate they were working, and which truck stop diner they had gathered
at for their coffee and breakfast. The gathering was a ritual that took place
at precisely two a.m. every morning. George reckoned that between two and three
in the morning you could run a NASCAR race up the interstate through Pickham
County. All the troopers from the surrounding fifty miles were gathered
somewhere for pancakes.

The troopers were pretty good
boys. They backed the various counties’ deputies in their patrol areas and the
deputies reciprocated. The relationship was cordial, and with some of the
troopers, it was downright friendly, as many of them had gotten their start in
small county or municipal departments before moving to the State Patrol.

Before his divorce, George had
thought about taking the exam and moving to the Patrol. Thinking was all he had
done though. Darlene had wanted him to make the change. The pay was better.
After a while, Darlene had tired of waiting for her husband to move his career
ahead, although she had never considered policing much of a career anywhere,
including the Patrol. Still, it was a step up from Pickham County, and she
expected her husband to be as upwardly mobile as he could be given his
limitations.

George told her he was waiting
for the right time to make the change, and told himself that he preferred doing
something besides traffic enforcement and drug interdiction stops on the
interstate. In reality, it boiled down to the fact the he was home, and he
really did not want to be anywhere else. It wasn’t until Darlene left with the
girls that he realized he had waited too long. He told her he would apply for
the Patrol if she would stay. She told him he was too late. He was always too
late.

“Dispatch, 301, I’ll be enroute
to back 302.” George put the microphone back in its cradle.

“Ten-four, 301,” the dispatcher
responded pleasantly. George could hear the chatter of other operators talking
in the background at the centralized dispatch center that was funded by various
counties and public safety units in this part of Georgia. Apparently, there was
not much going on, but it was still early. The shift was barely half over.

George guided his pickup to an
intersection and turned right, heading towards the missing person call. It was
a ten mile ride to Power Line Road. Missing persons did not constitute
emergency calls, so there was no hurry.

The hum of the car’s tires
increased in volume as he increased speed. The buzzing of the night creatures a
few feet away in the brush along the road diminished as the noise of the pickup
increased.

An old car moved smoothly through
the night in the opposite direction. No police officer would find any reason to
stop him, especially not the one that passed him moving southbound well above
the speed limit. The driver with the girl bound beside him, made his way to the
interstate and turned onto the northbound entrance ramp. Disappearing into the
stream of red taillights, he was more than anonymous. He was unseen and
unknown, once again.

‘Goddammit.’ The grizzled, old
farmer waved a bony hand at her as the girl climbed down out of the bed of the
aging Ford pickup. There was a deep look of concern in his eyes. ‘Goddammit,’
he thought again.

“Girl, you be careful now,” he
said out the window. The old man had girls too, and he could see that this one
was mistreated. Someone had done bad things to her. It happened some around
here, at least more than it should, especially if times were hard at home. The
farmer was a simple man and wanted to help, but all he could think of to do was
to give her a ride away from the trouble. Damn, he had trouble enough of his
own. Still, he wanted nothing worse to happen to her, and he knew that plenty
worse could happen. He didn’t want to think too much about that.

“I mean it, girl. You be
careful…especially about men and such.”