The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) (26 page)

“He says he has low blood sugar,” said Charlie. “Which means he can’t stir his ass from the couch, where he’s eating fried chicken and watching one of those garbage TV shows that are like Christmas for pedophiles.”

“Okay. So what’s up?”

“Here’s the thing,” said Charlie. “You know that boundary shit that Reese was too busy eating pork rinds to deal with? Well, it turns out Mike the Bike is
definitely
missing.”

Grayson lowered the recliner and sat up straight. “Oh shit.”

“Yeah, I know, right? And Barb’s freaking out. And I’m not sure I wanna go out there alone on account of the whole...you know...”

“...previous Barbara incident. Yes, we heard.”

Charlie gave a hopeful grin. “So. I could do with some back up?”

“Well, Joe was just leaving tomorrow morning...”

“Come on,” said Charlie. “Reese doesn’t give a shit if I live or die, but are you guys
really
gonna leave me to die at the hands of an enraged Hell’s Angel who’s probably lurking behind the trailer with a shotgun?”

“Depends,” said Grayson. “Is he likely to shoot bystanders?”

“I thought you said he was missing?” said Joe.

Charlie shrugged. “He is. That’s currently my best-case scenario – that he’s hanging out on the down-low so’s he can kill me.”

Grayson blinked. “Wishful thinking’s really not your strong point, is it?”

“Yeah, well the worst-case scenario looks most likely. Barb found a deer skull dumped in the hole Mike was digging out for that safehouse.”

“Swampers?” said Grayson, and the word was like a chill in the room. Joe had tangled with a couple before, but even at their worst the Everglades families couldn’t compare to the fearsome reputation of the Okefenokee packs.

“Most likely, yeah,” said Charlie. “Please? I could really use your nose, Joe.”

There had been a time when Joe would have laughed at the merest possibility that he’d ever be doing a favor for Charlie Silver or any other of Lyle’s men, but Lyle was rotting somewhere in a swamp and his shriveled black heart had long since passed through the tortured colon of that obese kid. Could you get sick from eating heart? As they drove out to the Hallett place Joe wondered if that was maybe the source of the sickly smell, and that he was sure he’d heard of some Arctic explorer who nearly died from eating dog liver, when his only option for survival was to chow down on the sled dogs.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t coming from Charlie. The pickup smelled of his usual mixture of blood and tobacco, sharp with an edge of something alkaline that told Joe that Charlie’s dealer was cutting the coke with baking powder. Before, Joe wouldn’t have even thought of baking powder as a thing that even had a smell, but now it burned the inside of his nose as sharply as if he’d breathed it in on purpose.

Barb Hallett’s trailer was a blowsy riot of scents - Southern Comfort, weed and cheap perfume. She sat hunched on one side of a narrow dining table, Mike’s shotgun propped against her knee. The floor shuddered as Grayson closed the door; a dreamcatcher shivered against the dark of the window.

“I wanted them to see me,” she said, looking out into the night. “I wanted them to know I’d blow their goddamn heads off.”

“Are they here?” asked Charlie. “They show themselves yet?”

She shook her head. It looked like she’d reapplied her mascara in anticipation of company - a typical Southern lady; always look presentable, even when you’re shithoused - but it started to run down her cheeks in raccoon rivulets all over again. “Brent and Tobin aren’t back,” she said. “And where the hell is Reese?”

“He’s...sick,” said Charlie.

“Sick my ass,” said Barb. “What the hell use is he?”

Charlie kept a credible poker face at that, although Grayson’s hasty look of nonchalance was nothing short of pathetic.

“We’re gonna take a look around,” said Charlie. “Sit tight, okay? You got your gun.”

“For what it’s worth,” she said, sniffing hard. “They’re swampers, Charlie. They don’t give a shit for guns. There’s only two people who ever kept them inbreds in line: one of them’s dead and the other one’s way down in the fucking Keys. And maybe she’s dead now, too.”

“No. She’s not,” said Joe.

Barb sniffed again. “Whatever. She’s a fat heap of good to me. I always said we needed the wolf witches, but Lyle knew better. You can always rely on a man to fuck everything up.”

“Present company excepted, I hope,” said Grayson, in the vague way that Joe had come to learn meant his attention was elsewhere. Joe turned to see Grayson flicking through a deck of cards next to a heavily scented candle and a bottle of some mean-looking liquor that smelled of aniseed.

“Thoth tarot,” Grayson murmured. “Designed by a follower of Aleister Crowley’s when he was running a sex cult in Palermo. I always liked the Art Nouveau style, didn’t you?”

“They’re my daughter’s,” said Barb.

“And the absinthe?”

“What are you? DEA?”

“No. Just curious.”

“You’ll have to excuse him, Barb,” said Charlie. “He’s curious about most things, except for vaginas.” He nudged Grayson in the back. “Come on, Curious George. Let’s go look for fascinating shit in the darkened woods. Hey, maybe we’ll die. That’ll be interesting, won’t it?”

Grayson ignored him and peered at nearby photo. It was of a young girl sitting on the tailgate of a pickup. She had the same eyes and the same stripy hillbilly highlights as Barb.

“She’s at work,” said Barb. “Safe. Don’t worry about her; just find my nephews. And Mike.”

They headed out, first along the disputed perimeter, where Charlie shone a flashlight down into the hole. The deer skull was still there, and there was no question that it had been placed there on purpose. The bone had been boiled clean and white and still held a faint tang of vinegar, making Joe shudder. If the stories he’d heard about the Okefenokee packs were true then Barb was lucky it was only a deer skull.

“You smell anything?” asked Charlie.

“No,” said Joe, although that wasn’t strictly true. He smelled
everything
, too many dead things to make out one from the other. Squirrel, deer, python and gator, everything that had recently died teeming with huge, pullulating colonies of bugs and flies and hungry things that were steadily reducing them to bone and mulch. The stink of the wet earth alone was enough to make his head spin, never mind the multiple scents of the different species of sweating leaves.

“What about you?” said Charlie, turning to Grayson. “You hear anything?”

“Charming. So you basically dragged both of us out here to act as cadaver dogs, is that it?”

“Well, I didn’t drag you out here for
art appreciation
,” said Charlie. “Seriously, what the fuck was that back there? Art Nouveau?”

“It was interesting. The daughter sounds like she might be a little bit witchy.”

Joe gave Grayson a sidelong look. “Are you kidding? I thought you said most of them were frauds these days.”

“They are.”

“But I’m guessing that’s not gonna stop you from glomming on every basic bitch with an astrological tattoo,” said Charlie. “Give it up, Grayson. Even if you did find a wolf witch, Reese would probably piss on the idea.”

Grayson sighed. “Yeah. You’re right.”

“You know I’m right. Besides, it’s like Barb says – there’s only one wolf witch with the kind of ju-ju you’d need to keep swamp wolves in line, and she’s not some teenager with a deck of tarot cards and a couple of Yankee Candles.”

“Wait,” said Joe. He caught the whiff of something synthetic, standing out stark against the carnival of rot. Wax and perfume, cinnamon oil. He started walking.

“What is it?” said Charlie, hurrying to keep pace.

“I
think
it’s a Yankee Candle.”

As he followed the scent other notes joined it, leather and dust and jasmine, a whisper of anise. He kept walking, the gift still new enough to surprise him. He knew what he was smelling but the canine part of his brain that understood it didn’t have words for it, and for some reason the connection between dog-brain and his brain had always been spotty. The word for what he was smelling was stuck inside his throat, but his sense of smell sketched out the lines of it, understood where each scent fit on the diagram – mud here, dust there, leather and oil.

When laid eyes on the thing his human brain understood at once. “
Pickup truck
,” he said, unable to keep the note of triumph out of his voice.

The others were less impressed. “Oh shit,” said Charlie.

“Isn’t that...?”

“Yep. The daughter’s.”

“She’s alive,” said Joe, catching the scent of jasmine, wound like a chill, sweet ribbon between the trees. He smelled girlish sweat and young blood, the clean, fast-flowing kind. Somewhere out there in the heaving sea of life and death, he smelled spilled blood, old blood, mingled with earth, but the scent of the girl was blinding. He stumbled forwards into the darkness.

She was standing maybe ten feet from the truck, straining her ears over the chorus of insects. When she saw them she let out a short yelp of fear and whipped out a short-nosed pistol.

Charlie held up his hands. “It’s okay. It’s me, Charlie. Remember me?”

Sarah-Lou narrowed her eyes. “No,” she said. She didn’t lower her weapon.

“Seriously, we’re not swamp wolves,” said Charlie, giving her a grin. He waved his hands. “Count the fingers.”

The girl’s expression thawed maybe half a degree. “Did my mom send you?”

“Yeah, although she thought you were at
work
.”

Sarah-Lou lowered the pistol. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t in the mood for it,” she said. “Got a lot on my mind.”

“We hear ya,” said Charlie. “This is Big Joe and this here is The Ghost Whisperer. And yeah, I know – his titties are a lot smaller than they look on TV.”

“You should go home,” said Joe. “It’s not safe out here.”

Sarah-Lou’s head whipped around. “You hear that?”

“No.”

She had that intent look again, the one she’d worn before she realized she was no longer alone. “Daddy?” she said.

Joe listened, but he could hear nothing but the sounds of the woods. He glanced over at Charlie, who shook his head, puzzled.

“He’s calling me!” said Sarah-Lou. “Why can’t you hear him?”

Joe turned back to look at Grayson, and the appalled look on the older man’s face told him exactly why; Grayson could only hear the thoughts of people who no longer had a pulse. Of all the times to stumble over a girl with genuine gifts.

“Okay,” said Grayson, hurrying to her side. “Why don’t we back to the trailer and wait with your mother. She’s all on her own and - ”

“ - what do you mean? You can hear him, can’t you? Don’t tell me you can’t – I can see it on your face.”

A breeze sent the smell screaming Joe’s way, that spilled, spoiled blood smell that the girl had almost drowned out. The scent of her panic was sharp musk, spiking under his nose, but now that the mud-blood-scream smell was there he couldn’t ignore it. Out of all the smells of death in the forest, this one rang out loud and clear.

Joe took off through the trees, Charlie following, cursing as he stumbled over roots and vines. In the growing distance Joe could hear Grayson trying to persuade Sarah-Lou to turn back without telling her exactly what he was trying to prevent her from seeing.

“What the fuck, man?” said Charlie, his breath rasping now. “What is it?”

“Give me the light,” said Joe, and shone the flashlight at his feet. On the ground was a biker kutte – Los Lobos, St. Augustine – the kind that bikers insisted on being buried in.

“Oh fuck,” said Charlie.

Joe kept moving. He knew now why he hadn’t smelled it – the usual rank sweetness of organs bloating in the heat. There was just blood and meat, a clean, abattoir smell like that of the lamb carcasses they hung in the basement every full moon. The ground below his feet was black with blood.

Charlie saw it first. “Look up,” he said, in a voice like he was trying to told everything down.

Joe looked up. He understood exactly what he was looking at, but his brain didn’t want to parse it and for a moment he just stared at the white things – one, two, three – hanging from the trees above. They were the wrong way up, and none of them had heads or arms. One was turned in a way that Joe could see the body was slit neatly from crotch to neck, everything scooped out, field dressed.

The letters swayed before his eyes, upside down and incomprehensible, but he knew what they said, Old English letters in black on morgue-white skin.

LOS LOBOS

ST. AUGUSTINE

“Oh my God,” he said. His face felt cold and numb, his guts scooped as hollow as the men hanging above him. He could hear Charlie’s ragged, tobacco stained breaths just beyond his ear.

“
Run
,” Charlie said.

*

It was over an hour before Charlie’s hands stopped shaking, but when he lifted the glass to his lips his teeth still clinked against it. He screwed up his nose and threw it back all the same.

“Jesus. That’s fucking terrible.”

“It’s Laphroaig, you peasant,” said Grayson. “If you wanted that sickly rye muck you should have taken a belt out of your hip flask there.”

“It’s empty,” said Charlie, and tucked the flask – that had been peeking over the pocket of his jeans – back out of sight.

“Yay. So you decided to get boozed up
before
taking us out on set at the reality show remake of
Cannibal Holocaust
?”

Charlie glared down at him. “You’re a prick,” he said.

“It’s been said, yes.”

“You didn’t even
see
it, Luke. Tell him, Joe. Tell him just how
fucked-up
that was out there, willya?”

Joe swallowed and shifted on the couch, his empty stomach still making unpleasant roiling noises. “It was bad,” he said, not wanting to go into further detail.

Charlie continued to pace back and forth across Grayson’s living room. His usual nervous energy had been cranked up to such levels that Joe wouldn’t have been surprised to see his feet striking sparks on the rug. Outside it had started to rain, but it wasn’t enough to wash away the smell still poking like a finger at the back of Joe’s gag reflex. Human bodies were never, ever supposed to smell like that. Like food.