56

Sissy Carol Sparks felt like crying. She hadn’t cried in years and had almost forgotten what it felt like. The crazy man was going to kill her, burn her alive. That’s what he’d said.

An hour ago she’d had his mouth drooling open, his eyes riveted on her as she’d crawled to him, breasts swinging, hair swaying, the ache of the rock in her thigh, but a soft and wanton smile on her lips. “C’mon, mister,” she’d purred. “You don’t want to hurt me. I can do things to you that’ll leave you seeing stars for a week.”

“Can you fix me?” he’d whispered, a man in a sexual trance. “I need it so bad.”

If I can wear him down, fuck him senseless, I might be able to run outta this hellhole … he even left the door open a crack …

“I can fix you up perfect, mister,” she’d promised. “I’ll make you right.”

The man stared down, a moan escaping his lips as Sissy moved to him. She’d unzipped his stained pants and slipped the underwear down over a bulge; not standing out, but she could fix that. Her fingers moved tantalizingly slow as she eased the saggy yellow boxers down his thighs …

Gasping. Staring. Disbelief.

Everything was swollen like a purple balloon and crusty with blood and pus and she could see what looked like bright pieces of wire sticking out. Her nostrils flooded with a stench remembered from when her grampa had the diabetes and his toe rotted off.

Gangrene, they called it.

“Fix him, girl,” the man pleaded, grabbing Sissy’s hair and pulling her face close to the reeking, dying organ. “Put your mouth on him and make him better.”

Sissy had recoiled, pulling her head back. The man had put his hand behind her head, trying to drag her into him. “FIX HIM!” the man screamed. “MAKE HIM WELL!”

Sissy had puked her guts across the floor, driving the man even crazier, shrieking about whores and sin and beating her with hands swinging like windmills. She rolled across the floor as he kicked at her, screaming in his own pain as she screamed in hers. He’d cornered her beside a big concrete bench thing with burn marks across it but when he moved in Sissy punched him in his crotch. He’d wailed like an animal and dropped to the floor.

Sissy bolted through the door, finding a woods, trees and vines and bushes and a house in the near distance. She had run to the house and pounded on the door, screaming for help. The door was opened by a pretty-faced man in a cowboy hat.

“Help me …” Sissy pleaded. “There’s a crazy man in that barn over there. He’s trying to kill me.”

“I know,” the cowboy had said in a pleasant voice, his eyes glittering like hot little stars. “You need to pay for your sins, Miss Sparks.”

The cowboy grabbed her neck, Sissy’s strength used up in the fight with the crazy man …

Who limped up to the house two minutes later, punched her senseless, and led her back to the barn on a rope.

“No Sissy Carol Sparks?” I said to Belafonte.

She looked disconsolate, sitting beside the phone and leafing through reports. “The others were found within hours of being dumped. I expected something by now.”

“Sparks could still be alive,” I said.

“So you believe in fairy tales?”

Belafonte had the tight-eyed stare of someone about to either scream, throw things, or both, and I set her on finding out all she could about Andy Delmont, né Dredd. And fast. I mainly needed to know where he lived. Mr Delmont and I were overdue for a long talk.

My phone rang: Harry told me about a girl named Greta, and parties, and men with diminutives for names.

“Suggestions?” I asked, feeling I was tumbling back in time, the single-word question one I’d asked my senior partner a thousand times before.

“Put a watch on the motel. Tail the bastards to their hole by East Tohopekaliga lake. It’s about fifteen miles from the park.”

I established the availability of the chopper, then phoned authorities in Osceola County and told them to set a table for the FCLE tonight.

“Did you say Osceola County?” Belafonte said when I hung up.

“Harry thinks Hallelujah Jubilee bigwigs are taking some girls to a party house tonight. Why?”

“Mr Delmont-Dredd has property in Osceola County, a farm. He also has a house in Jacksonville.”

“How did you get that info so fast?”

“Mr Monroe taught me a few things,” she blinked. “Like back-door entries to various state agencies when those agencies are closed.”

I ran several scenarios through my mind. “It sounds like Osceola County is where the action is tonight. The chopper’s coming for us in minutes. We gotta book fast, a storm’s rolling in from the Gulf.”

“Chopper for us? Both?”

“I need someone to supervise a stakeout at a motel and then, hopefully, a bust. Harry can’t, I don’t know the Osceola cops, so you’re in charge, Holly. Better go powder your baton.”

Lightning from the incoming storm quivered in the western sky by the time we hit the Osceola County Police HQ. Most senior staff were in Atlanta for a convention and we inherited Sergeant Eddie Baskins. He was in his late thirties, a big, baby-faced, loud-voiced good ol’ boy, over six and a half feet tall and belly-centric. I figured he’d once been a standout on the local football team, probably by falling on his opponents.

I was a bit less certain of his cop credentials. Maybe it was the mother-of-pearl grip on his sidearm and uniform pants tucked into red, hand-tooled cowboy boots. I doubted he wore them when his superiors were in town.

“Of course we can handle your stakeout, Detective,” Baskins affirmed, tapping the glitzy semi-auto and studying a wall-mounted map of the county. “There’s a team stationed at a park by the lake, extra manpower to assist in the operation. The secondary unit is our SWAT team.”

He picked up a Dixie cup and spat a saliva-glistening wad of tobacco sludge into it, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Three Osceola officers were in attendance, all in their twenties. One winced, one rolled his eyes, the third stared at the floor. I got the feeling they hoped the Atlanta convention would be brief.

Belafonte eyed Baskins warily. “Do you think perhaps the SWAT unit is a bit of overkill, Sergeant?”

Baskins frowned. “I believe I’ll be the judge of that, little lady. Who did you say you were again?”

“Holly Belafonte,” she said. “I’m handling your stakeout.”

“She’s handling it?” Baskins said, head snapping to me. “I thought you and him were in the lead.” Baskins jabbed a finger toward Harry, leaning the wall with arms crossed. I’d introduced Harry simply as Detective Nautilus, omitting that Detective was a former title. Another demerit for Baskins, who should have checked Harry’s ID.

“Detective Nautilus and I are going to Cypress Lake,” I said. “We’d appreciate a couple of your people coming along.”

Baskins narrowed an eye, like we were city slickers trying to pull something. “First you needed assistance on a stakeout he groused. “Now you’re adding things.”

Belafonte stepped up. “May I inquire if that costs additional?”

Baskins turned to her. “What?”

“Like when you get a scoop of ice cream and it’s two dollars,” she said, elegant fingers mimicking dropping sprinkles into ice cream. “But if you add chocolate jimmies, it’s two-fifty.” Belafonte clicked opened her purse and pretended to root around inside. “If it costs more to add an expedition to Cypress Lake, how much will it be?”

Baskins stared down a foot at Belafonte, sure he was being either used or mocked. “Where the hell are you from, lady?” he challenged. “That stupid accent sure as hell ain’t Miami.”

“I’m from Bermuda,” Belafonte said, hand still in her purse.

Here we go, I thought.

“That’s in South America,” Baskins growled. “What the hell you doing here?”

In a microsecond the baton was out and extended and whipped an inch under the Sergeant’s nose to thwack the map on the wall.

“What we are doing here,” Belafonte said softly, “you, me, your officers … is conducting a surveillance operation.” The baton tip repositioned with another thwack. “Here is where we are, and” – thwack – “here is where we are going. That’s what we’re doing here, Sergeant,” she said. “But what I’m doing right this instant is wondering if you’re professional enough to conduct a proper surveillance, and can your people tail another vehicle without DRIVING UP THEIR BLOODY ARSE?”

The room went as silent as a tomb. Baskins swallowed hard and nodded.

It was twilight as most of the cops charged off in Belafonte’s wake, Harry and I and two Osceola officers speeding to Andrew Delmont’s southern hideaway. A mile west of the Florida Turnpike by Cypress Lake, it was tucked into several tree-dense acres, a heavy gate barring a gravel lane that snaked into the overgrowth. The Osceola guys were a bit nervous since I had no warrant, but I told them we were just going to ring the doorbell, like bible salespeople.

The cops pushed the gate open and we headed through, the night now dark and streaked with lightning to the southwest. I smelled rain in the stiffening wind, the treetops dancing as we drove two hundred yards to a pair of buildings in a clearing. The scene was not what I’d have pictured for a successful gospel artist, the house small and gray and desperately needing paint, shutters hanging askew, the sparse grass studded with weeds. There was no light in the house.

I climbed the steps to the listing porch and pounded the door. “Mr Delmont? Andy Delmont? I’m from the Florida Center for Law Enforcement and I need to ask you some questions.”

Not so much as a creak of a floorboard inside. I backed away, staring at the house until hearing words from this afternoon, Pastor Tate: “The Dredds were originally from Satsuma, Detective, a broken-down old house on the edge of town.”

Was Delmont, consciously or subconsciously recreating a childhood home?

“No one’s here,” I said. “Anything down the lane?”

The county mounties aimed their headlamps down the dusty trail, revealing a barn in the distance, half sunk into overgrowth. “Might be a place to hide a van,” Harry said.

I nodded. “Gotta look. Then we’ll head to Delmont’s home in Jacksonville. Bet it’s fancier than this wreck.”

Harry and I drove the five hundred feet to the barn, the slats of a one-time corral rotting on the ground, connected by tangles of barbed wire. We got to the door as rain started. I heard Harry sniffing the air.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been smelling rain for an hour.”

“Not rain,” he said. “I smell smoke. And … is that gasoline? Kerosene?”

I suddenly smelled it, too. “I think it’s naphtha,” I said. The door was unlocked and swung into a wall of black. The smell became overwhelming.

“There’s gotta be a light,” Harry said, patting at the wall. “There.”

The barn flooded with sickly yellow illumination. I saw a brown-dirt floor littered with round stones the size of oranges, a stack of torn fabric, and at the far end sat a concrete bench, charred, reeking of oil and naphtha.

Atop the bench lay a woman, naked, bound by ropes, her bruised head hanging off the side. Dead, but not yet wrapped. I felt sickened as we crossed a floor studded with orange-sized stones. Getting closer, I saw none of the expected tissue damage from being pummeled with rocks. I picked up speed, running the final feet.

The woman’s eyes flickered open and her head turned our way.

“I never thought I’d be happy to see cops,” she said, her voice a dry rasp as her mouth fought to make a brave smile. “You guys are cops, I hope?”

“What did Dredd say?” I asked Sparks as she was loaded into the ambulance ten minutes later. She had a hematoma on her thigh and various facial contusions, but seemed in good shape, considering. “Did Dredd tell you where he was going or when he’d be back?”

The medic handed her a cup of water and Sparks refreshed her voice. “The bastard was screaming about blasphemy and needing to leave, but that he’d be back to kill me. He was real pissed off by something about Pentecost. I mean, even for a lunatic with a rotting dick. It was crazy … like he was yelling into the scar in his chest.”

“The man in the cowboy garb,” I said, “Delmont. Any idea of his whereabouts?”

“I heard a car leave. It was still light out.”

“Just one vehicle?” I asked.

“It sounded like it. But mostly what I could hear was my heart.”

“Suggestions?” I asked Harry, twice in one evening.

“Dredd is a big package of weirdness, Delmont seems a big package of weirdness. The only other weirdness I know is whatever the hell Owsley’s doing in that building behind Hallelujah Jubilee. Maybe the weirdnesses are coming together.”