River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (24 page)

It was on July nineteenth, he remembered, that he lost his virginity. He had taken Angela to the cave, where she’d been several times before, but always during the day with Molly and Byrd around. This night, they were inside with a lantern glowing, fooling around some and talking some, and she got to exploring. Wade barely remembered the nudie magazines he and Byrd had cached a couple years earlier, but she found them and started flipping the pages, looking at the naked women.

“Are my boobs as big as hers?” she asked, letting a centerfold flop open.

Wade wasn’t sure how to answer. Was this one of those “does this dress make me look fat?” questions? You didn’t need to watch a lot of relationship sitcoms on TV to know there was no safe way to answer this.

He tried to dodge. “It’s hard to say.”

She put down the magazine and slipped off her tank top, then reached back and unfastened her bra, letting it fall to the cave floor. “How about now?” she asked. “Without all that stuff in the way?”

Her breasts were high and firm, smaller than the magazine model’s but plenty big enough for Wade. He still wasn’t sure how to answer, so instead of speaking he leaned forward and took one of them in his mouth.

She moaned in response, arching her back and pressing it against his face. He took the other breast in his hands, moving his mouth between both. The next thing he knew, she had unzipped his pants and released the erection he’d been sure would split them open. With the naked flesh of a dozen photo layouts on the ground around them, Angela kicked off her jeans, sank back onto the cave floor, and guided him into her. Having not thought to bring a condom, he hesitated for a moment, but she read his expression. “I’m on the pill,” she whispered. “To control my acne.”

“But what about diseases?” he asked, battling the urge to shut up and enjoy the moment. STDs were a big topic of discussion in health class.

“I’m a virgin, too, silly,” Angela assured him.

A moment’s wonder at how she had known that he was threw him. Had he done something wrong? But then he lost himself in the soft moistness of her and began to move with her.

That night, alone in his bed, was like the night he had felt up Jenna Blair. His mind raced in circles and he got hard all over again just remembering how it had felt. He wondered if he loved Angela Mills and if she loved him. He hoped she wouldn’t be offering herself to Byrd in a couple weeks. He finally fell asleep, and his dreams were all about her.

His mom woke him up early the next morning with tears running down her cheeks. “Honey, you’re friends with that Kenner boy, aren’t you?” she asked.

He sat up in bed, gripping the covers over his lap to hide his morning erection. “Russ Kenner? Sure, I guess so. He was on the JV team with Byrd. What’s up?”

“I just heard on the radio news,” she said, stifling a sob. “He’s been killed.”

“Killed how? What happened?”

“I don’t know much. They didn’t give a lot of detail. Just he’s been killed, and the sheriff doesn’t know who done it.”

“Jeez, Mom,” he said. He had never known anyone who’d been murdered, and wasn’t quite sure how to respond.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” she said. She wrapped her arms around him. Thankfully, his erection had vanished.

It didn’t take long for the details to come out, at least as rumors passed from one of Kenner’s schoolmates to another. Officially, the sheriff remained tightlipped about it all, but Joe Ed Botkin’s dad was a deputy, and he told Joe Ed, and pretty soon everyone had heard.

On the night that Wade had been losing his virginity with Angela, Russ Kenner had been out in the desert, drinking with some buddies. They’d convinced someone to buy them a couple of six-packs, and got a pretty good buzz on. But Julio Robles, who was nineteen, had driven them out there in his old Firebird, and he had to get up early the next morning to drive his pregnant sister to El Paso for a doctor’s appointment. So at ten, he announced that he was heading home, and anyone who wanted a ride had better come now.

All the guys piled back into the car, complaining the whole way. Julio didn’t even take them all home, but dropped them off at the intersection of Palo Duro and River—in the parking lot of the Bottle Stop, in fact, where the beer had been purchased—and let them walk from there.

Russ Kenner lived about three miles away. He walked on River part of the way, then cut across some fields to Burns. It was on Burns Road, according to Joe Ed, that he met someone else.

Whoever that someone was, Joe Ed claimed, he was strong. He took Russ into an irrigation ditch at the edge of a cotton field and choked the life from him, kneeling on his chest with one knee, pressing down hard enough to snap some ribs and send one of them through Russ’s right lung. Then he took a sharp knife, like a hunting knife, and made a cut across Russ’s forehead and two more down the sides of his face. That done, he peeled Russ’s face from his head. Joe Ed’s dad speculated that he did this to make it harder to identify the victim. When the sheriff’s deputies found Russ, though, alerted by his parents when he didn’t come home that night, they were able to confirm his identity by the wallet in his back jeans pocket. His fingerprints were intact, too. And they found the raggedly torn-off face, or most of it, hanging on top of a stake that held a bollworm trap, a quarter mile up the ditch.

The news sent a shock wave through the teenagers of Malo Duro. They’d been enjoying their summer—some were working (Byrd had a job as a stock boy at the Mercantile, while Wade had picked up odd farm jobs here and there), while others were just hanging out, maybe experimenting with sex like Wade and Angela, or booze and dope, like Russ and his pals. Suddenly, it was as if a noxious cloud floated between them and the sun, the murder in their midst casting their summer in a new, terrible light.

What made it worse was that it was only the first.

Joey Quivira came next. He had been working on a car in his garage one night. When his parents went out to look for him, they found him on the ground with his throat slashed and screwdrivers jammed through his chest and into his lungs.

Kurt Brown had been driving home after dropping off his date—they’d gone all the way into El Paso to see
Aliens
—when he’d stopped on a quiet country lane for an unknown reason. His killer had propped him up with his head in the door of the car, and slammed it enough times to pulp his skull. Brains and blood had leaked onto the road and soaked the floor mat.

The county sheriff started warning people, particularly teenage boys, against being outside alone at night. Most of the guys took it to heart. Byrd and Wade started spending nights at each other’s houses—usually Byrd’s— so that if they were together in the evening, neither of them had to bike home alone. But some didn’t get the message, or didn’t heed it, and the murders continued through the rest of that summer. Jason Barnett, shot through the head three times, his eyes gouged out with a spoon. Kenny Trimble, stabbed multiple times, partially scalped. Emilio Villanova was knocked unconscious, and then his body was placed on the ground with his head right in front of a tractor wheel. The tractor had passed over his skull at least twice, leaving something that looked, as Joe Ed Botkin had claimed, like strawberry applesauce.

Not all of these guys were on Byrd’s football team or in Wade’s class, but most of them were. They were all students at Palo Duro High.

The sheriff admitted that he didn’t have any solid leads. There had been tips, hundreds of them, most of them useless. Joe Ed said a woman had called from Ely, Nevada, to confess. A Baptist preacher from Hardeeville, South Carolina, had called to say that he believed one of the men in his congregation, who he was sure was a homosexual, might be to blame. A few people around Malo Duro told of seeing a dark pickup truck out on some of the nights of the murders, but it would have been more unusual in that area for anyone not to have seen a pickup or two around town.

By the time Jason Barnett died, Wade was pretty sure he knew the truth.

When Kenny Trimble and then Emilio Villanova were murdered, he was certain.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“It’s my dad.”

“Your dad?” Byrd echoed. “What is? What are you talkin’ about, dude?”

“Killing all those guys.”

They were at the cave. Screwing Angela there had changed it for Wade, somehow, had stolen away some of its youthful innocence. It had been like something out of
Tom Sawyer
, but now it was more
Huckleberry Finn
—an adult tale disguised as a kid’s adventure.

“Your dad?” Molly asked. She was only twelve. Wade had not wanted to say anything in front of her, but they’d started talking about the murders and it had slipped out. She’d been sitting on the dirt floor reading an
Archie
comic, but now she left it spread open on her lap, forgotten, and stared at Wade with eyes so wide it must have hurt. “Your dad’s the murderer?”

Wade blew out a heavy sigh. “I think so, yeah.”

“You’re nuts,” Byrd said. “You’re absolutely bugfuck.”

“Byrd!” Molly snapped, as she usually did these days when he employed language she considered obscene or inappropriate. Which, given that it was Byrd, was fairly often.

“Sorry,” he said to her. “But you are, Wade.”

“I don’t think so. I wish I was wrong. I just don’t see how I could be.”

“Why, you catch him washin’ blood off his hands or somethin’? You find the keys to the tractor he ran over Emilio with?”

“Someone got ran over with a tractor?” Molly asked. They’d done their best to keep her out of the rumor loop.

“Never mind, Moll. Maybe you should go play with dolls or somethin’.”

“Forget that,” she said. “I want to hear about Wade’s dad.”

“Fuck it, I don’t care,” Wade said. He balled his fists and punched the cave floor. “Look, he’s been going out a lot at night lately. Ever since…you know, Byrd. He hasn’t laid a hand on me or Mom since then, but he’s been going out. I thought he was drinking with his friends from work, maybe. He’d come home sometimes, pretty late, acting a little buzzed, but never as drunk as he used to get.”

“Sounds like our little talk had a positive impact,” Byrd said.

“Maybe,” Wade said. “But the first murder was Russ Kenner, right? That was the night of July nineteenth.”

“How do you know that?” Byrd asked.

“Never mind, I just do. Anyway, I remember my dad was out that night. He came home after I’d gone to bed, and I went to bed pretty late, and then couldn’t sleep. I heard him come in and shuffle around in his workroom for a while before he went to bed.”

“So what?”

“So then when Jason Barnett got it, he was out that night, too. I couldn’t remember for sure if he’d been out the nights of the other murders, but after that I started paying attention. Kenny Trimble, he was out. Emilio Villanova, he was out. That’s four of them out of, what…six? That’s a pretty bad record.”

“Maybe,” Byrd said. He pursed his lips. Wade had never looked at him quite the same, since he’d watched him kick the shit out of his father. He was a handsome guy—deeply tanned, well muscled—and now he took on the air of a superhero in Wade’s eyes. “But it’s all, whaddyacallit, circumstantial, right?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.” Wade dug into the backpack he had brought to the cave with him, in which he carried an extra flashlight, batteries, cassette tapes, some reading material, and other odds and ends. He pulled out an object wrapped in a paisley bandanna and unwrapped it, revealing a large knife in a brown leather sheath with a pocket for a sharpening stone. “So I went snooping around in his workroom, and I found this.” He tugged the knife from its sheath, displaying a wicked blade, serrated across the top edge.

“Shit,” Byrd said.

“Yeah. Joe Ed’s dad said he thinks the knife that stabbed Kenny was the same one that cut off Russ Kenner’s face, and maybe the same one that sliced Joey Quivira’s throat.”

“Joe Ed’s dad is so dumb he’s practically retarded.”

“Mom says that’s not a nice word.”

“Mom’s right, Molly. But it’s true.” Byrd inspected the knife without touching it. “Dude, you have to take this to the cops.”

“I want to,” Wade said. “But like you said, it’s all circumstantial. Even this—it’s just a knife, and there’s not a speck of blood on it that I can see. I’m finally kind of getting along okay with my dad, for the first time in my life, pretty much. If I turn him in with no real proof, what’s he gonna think about that? I mean, he’ll hate me all over again.”

“What do you want to do, then? You can’t just sit on it.”

Wade put the knife back into its case, wrapped it up, and shoved it deep in the backpack. “I have an idea about that.”

“What?”

“I’m going to keep an eye on him when he goes out.”

“Won’t he be drivin’?”

“Sure. But there aren’t a lot of roads around here, you might have noticed. There are plenty of fields, and trails across those. I think on my bike I can cut through and mostly keep up with him. He won’t be watching for anyone following him that way.” He had flopped around in bed most of the night, trying to get comfortable, trying to forget the lurid stories he’d heard of John Wayne Gacy and Henry Lee Lucas and their kind. His father had always had anger issues, to put it mildly. Had something tipped him over the edge, sent him into a murderous rage from which there was no coming back?