1

We decided the prudent thing would be to call Verle and let him come on out with Ronnie and Doug and maybe a couple of troopers and seal the place off for Gaylord and Miss Song to do their work.  But that meant walking back to the car and probably driving out of the hollow to find enough gain to let the call go through. 

Instead, we elected to do the imprudent thing and sweep all these crazy bastards up ourselves.  Kate anyway said, “Fuck it.” She grabbed my light out of my pocket and headed for the stairs.

Maurice came too for pretty much the same reasons I was going.  We weren’t quite man enough to be left even together alone.  Kate’s fury was comforting somehow.  We followed the light beam as she crossed the yard toward the house with the TV, but we could just as readily have followed her muttering too.  She was furious and disgusted and, I guess, exasperated.  She thought she’d known about these folks from several years of chasing them, but she’d only ever seen the lab reports and a trio of their victims.  Now she’d run up on the pitch of trouble they’d been going to all along.

The industriousness of it all was what seemed to gall Kate most. The conspicuous care and attention to detail, the near compulsive sense of order all in pursuit of brutal, murderous ends.  It offended her, and when she got offended she got mad.  And when she got mad, she got rash, and when she got rash with her Glock in her hand, I could be fairly certain that gunplay would ensue.

To Kate’s credit, she let me do some reconnoitering at the house.  It was a frame farmhouse, all brittle and creaky.  You’d have heard somebody walking inside, even somebody shifting his weight in an easy chair.  We only got the sound of the TV, evening magazine show rubbish about a starlet with a stalker and a Golden Globe nod too.  I checked the windows all around and saw that the back door off the kitchen was standing open just a crack.  There was a car parked in the backyard.  A purple Pontiac.

We left Maurice behind a tree in the front, which was quite all right with him even though it was just a poplar and he would have preferred a giant sequoia.  He made himself small and all but disappeared in the shadow of the trunk.  Kate and I left him and circled around back.  She wanted to go in first, but I insisted on the lead since I thought that might cause her to pause before she let loose a couple of rounds, just for the trouble she’d surely make by shooting me in the back. 

So in I went, across the back porch and into the kitchen proper.  I was aiming for stealth but everything that possibly could make a racket made one.  The door hinges squeaked and the rolled linoleum on the kitchen floor popped and crackled to a fare-thee-well underfoot.  I stopped midway past the dinette just to have a listen, and Kate walked right up my back.

She prodded me with her gun barrel and hissed at me, “Go on.”

There were two routes out of the kitchen and deeper into the house.  I chose the one nearer the kitchen sink and what looked like a newish cooktop.  The whole kitchen, in fact, looked recently refitted and was about as shiny and tidy as kitchens come.  No dishes in the sink.  None in the drainer, just washcloths laid out to dry.  There was the distinctive chlorinated scent of Comet in the air and not the usual stale fry grease, coffee grounds, and rank stink of souring milk.  These folks, whoever they turned out to be, were some kind of serious neatnics.

Kate followed me instead of just charging out the other doorway like I feared, and together we eased up a dim back hallway with what looked like basement stairs to the left, an old-style phone alcove, and a trio of doors to the right with bedrooms, I figured, and one full bath behind them.  Those rooms were all dark, the doors half pulled to.  We crept past them toward the front. 

When I say crept, I mean we made the timbers and the floorboards creak and pop more slowly than they would have if we’d been just walking a regular sort of way.  But we weren’t anything approaching quiet.  That house was just too old and shaky for something like that.  The TV helped cloak us a little.  It was turned up loud, and we had the benefit of a commercial for a knife set that included not just a spiral carver but some sort of fruit whittler as well. 

I eased up to the front room doorway and took a quick peek around the jamb.  There wasn’t anybody on the settee, not sitting up anyway, since I could just see the back of it from where I stood.  There was a recliner opposite in a corner, and that was vacant as well.  A rocker nearer the front door, and nobody was in that either.

I shook my head Kate’s way to let her know I saw nobody.  Then I stepped full into the room with Kate crowding close behind me.  There was a bowl of pecan clusters on a sofa side table.  A few ladies' magazines on a tea cart by the door.  Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living.

We heard something hit the floor upstairs.  A lone thump overhead and then nothing.  Kate led the way this time up a brief front hallway to the cramped steep stairs that led to the half story above.

We were sitting ducks in that stairwell.  If somebody showed up on the landing with a 12 gauge or even a .22, there was nothing for us to do but probably get shot to pieces.  So Kate hustled and hoped the TV would mask the racket we were making.  We figured anybody in the place would know we were there by now.

The top of the stairs gave on to a tiny strip of floor and a couple of doors. Kate opened the one to her left and found just raw attic.  Pasteboard boxes stacked neatly and two massive foot lockers.  There was the distinct aroma of naptha in the air.  The door to the right opened onto a bedroom, a garret room with a pitched roof and a pair of dormer windows.  It was dark but for the light we let in from the front room downstairs.  There was a bed, a dresser, what looked like a washstand, a floor lamp with a fringed shade.  When Kate threw the light switch, that’s what came on.  The light it gave off was dingy and nearly pointless, like the dome light in a car. 

I heard him before I saw him.  I’d had a couple of cats before and so was acquainted with their burbles and percolating noises.  This one loosed a couple before he leapt off a chifferobe in the corner, over on the far side of the bed.  He hit the floor like a sack of summer squash, and Kate probably would have shot him if I hadn’t been telling her from the first sound I’d heard out of the creature, “Cat.”

He shot under the bed on the far side, out between us on the near one, and went skidding across the landing and down the stairs.  The room looked empty otherwise, and we were about to head back down when I saw something I couldn’t explain or place over against the far wall.  It was beyond the bed and between the washstand and the chifferobe, just a dark round thing against the beaded wallboard about level with the mattress.

“What’s that?” I asked Kate.

She was just that much shorter and couldn’t see a thing.

I circled the foot of the bed, and that’s when I saw him full, just sitting there on the floor with his back to the wall.  He looked like anyone would look.  I pointed my pistol at him, recognized him straightaway from his mug shot even if he seemed a little more wan and drawn.

“All right, Danny,” I told him.  “Let’s see those hands.”

He didn’t even glance my way, just kept on sitting there doing nothing.

“Hey here, sport.”  Still not a dent.

Kate was at my shoulder by then.  She’d seen more of this sort of thing than I had, I guess.

“Come on,” I told Danny.

Kate stepped right past me and squeezed in between the bed and wall.  She laid a finger to Danny’s neck to check for a pulse, but she only had to touch him to know.

“Danny’s not getting up,” Kate informed me.  “Danny’s been dead for a while.”

He was cold and stiff.  His eyes were open, and he looked to be contemplating the flowery duvet cover on the bed.

He wasn’t dressed like you’d expect hillbilly white trash to dress.  Danny had on wide whale corduroy slacks with two-inch cuffs at the bottom, a button-down chambray shirt underneath a cardigan sweater.  The blue deck shoes he was wearing were desiccated and oversized.

“I guess they’ll kill any damn body,” I said. 

“Must not have fit with the plan.”

Now that we’d seen both Danny’s place and the compound in Gullysville, I could understand how a coven of obsessive, anal-retentive, homicidal nuts might find Danny more of a headache than they could tolerate with grace.  Where your normal crackers would have beaten him bloody and cast him into the wilderness, this group just went and did him in, probably took out his liver or something.

Kate opened his shirt enough to reveal a sutured incision running east-west across Danny’s midsection.  It didn’t look to be as tidy as some of the other work we’d seen.  Rushed was my impression and inattentive to details, the sort of thing you’d do to your own that you wouldn’t go out in the world and do to strangers.

“Let’s leave him for Gaylord,” Kate said, “and check the rest of this place.”

That was more than fine with me.  We went down and inspected all of the other rooms in the house, each as tidy as the last and not a one of them cluttered up with bodies.  We opened all the drawers in the dressers and checked the closets too.  There were no clothes to speak of anywhere or many personal effects. 

Then it was straight out the front door driving before us a panicked cat, which put a fright in Maurice who sang out, “What the shit’s that?”

It seemed clear we weren’t likely to surprise anyone now, and you could pretty much feel that the entire compound was unpopulated, abandoned.   So I switched on my light and left it on, and we marched straight over to the next house where there was just a lamp burning in the front room and no sign of anybody about.  Aside from a can of chicory coffee in the refrigerator, everything had been emptied out and the stuff all hauled away.

The next house was the same.  It was a trailer at the core with additions and porches added on to the outside like carbuncles.  As those dwellings went, it was the trashiest of the lot, the junkiest, and the least well tended.  Even still, we only found a pair of men’s brown socks and a navy blue bandana, a can of potted meat in the cabinet by the icebox, and a week-old copy of The Virginia News Leader.   

Kate wanted a proper poke through the first house again now that we knew who was around and who wasn’t, so I left her to it while I went back to the Crown Vic to see if I could raise Verle. 

Maurice came with me.  We had to drive back out to the Gullysville road and nearly all the way to the mouth of the hollow before I could even get meaningful static on my radio.

I finally raised Doug who tracked down Verle, and I gave him what we had.

“Regular slaughterhouse,” I told him.  “But looks like they packed up and left.”

I gave Verle my view of the people he should raise and the team he ought to gather, gave him directions on where they all needed to go.

Verle told me, “All right,” and then rang straight off that way he always did.

Maurice lobbied hard in his cracker fashion for me to carry him on home. 

“Ain’t far,” he told me while pointing at the little dipper. 

I’d served enough papers on him to know where he lived.  It was a good half hour away.  So I just turned around and headed back to the track into the woods with Maurice complaining at me all the while. 

Kate had turned on lights all over by the time we got back.  Lamps and overhead globes, porch lights and floodlights as well.  Every switch she could find to throw she’d thrown, so the place was thoroughly illuminated, and I drove off the track and full onto the lawn, was about to stop and park when me and Maurice together heard the gunfire.  Both the pop from Kate’s pistol and the crack of a rifle.

Maurice would have crawled in the trunk if I’d let him.  He was one of those lover-not-fighter crackers.  Instead, he just dove on the floorboard while I got out of the car and tried to decide which way to go. 

The rifle fire was coming from the woods.  I could tell that much.  Kate sounded to be in the first house we’d entered, but with the echo I couldn’t really tell.  I didn’t want to charge inside just to have her turn and clip me.  She was just the sort of creature to put you down and have a solid think about it later, so I indulged in what would have looked like slinking to Maurice and probably something worse than that to Verle or even Ronnie.  But I knew Kate well enough to be a little leery of her, so I eased up onto the porch and had myself a listen instead of just jumping straight into the gunplay.

She was in there all right.  Kate was peppering the dense back woods with pistol fire.  I’d been shot at by her in the quarry, so I knew what that was like.  She’d spray rounds out of that Glock of hers in bursts of a half dozen, faster than you’d think a human finger could work.  The effort made for a fairly comprehensive preoccupation, so I wanted to make extra sure that she knew who and where I was.  Didn’t just turn around and give me six.

“Hey!” I shouted.

Nothing from Kate.  Another crack out of the woods.  I heard the bullet thunk into the siding and crash on through.  From the racket, I decided the kitchen wasn’t any place to be.

Kate must have figured that out as well because she was upstairs with Danny.

“Hey!” I shouted again.

She told me from upstairs, “Shut the fuck up.”

I mounted the stairs.  “I’m coming up.”

“What the hell did I just say?”

So I didn’t make her promise not to shoot me but just climbed the stairs in hopes she wouldn’t bother.

She had the washstand between herself and the wall, and she was taking darting glances out the back dormer windows.  When I eased open the door to come into the room, light from downstairs came in with me.

She hissed at me, “Shut it!”

I did.

“Get low.”

I did that too and crawled over to where she was.

“How many?”

“One,” she told me, “and he can’t shoot worth shit.”

We got an example along about then.  It sounded like the bullet hit the vent pipe for the toilet.  It sang and ricocheted and sounded to be heading back into the woods.

“Where is he?” I asked her.

“About ten yards deep.”  She pointed at the tree line.  “Maybe eleven o’clock.”

Truth be told, I couldn’t see much of anything out the window.  Kate had raised the sash and had been firing through the screen. 

“All those yours?” I asked of the holes in the screen wire.

She nodded.  “He hasn’t come close.  Either isn’t trying or is firing wild.”

“So now what?”

“You shoot.  I’ll look for his muzzle flash.”

“Shoot where?”

“Doesn’t matter.  Just into the woods.”

And that’s what I did.  I squeezed off four rounds in the time it would take Kate to fire seven or eight.

She told me, “Jesus, Tatum,” just to let me know what a miserable gunsel I was while she stayed fixed on the dark woods waiting on return fire. 

He didn’t disappoint us.  We got two shots in return from right where Kate suspected.  She drew a bead and let him have half a clip.  Then I had nothing but ringing ears for some minutes after that.  My head was still buzzing when Kate asked me, “Hear him?”

I shook my head.

“Now?”

I still couldn’t hear shit.

She listened at the window.  Pointed toward the trees.  Finally I could hear him as well.  He sounded a bit like a nightjar at first or some sort of exotic cricket.  He was blubbering and seemed to be in mucousy conversation with himself.

“What’s he saying?” I asked Kate.

She shook her head.  We listened some more.

“He’s crying, right?”

Kate nodded.  “Come on out,” she told him.

He blubbered some more and then fired a shot.  I think it went straight up in the air.

Kate raised her pistol, but I stopped her from returning fire.  We could still hear the crying.  The strangled talking.

“Sounds like a kid,” I said.

“Come on out,” Kate shouted down again.  This time we could hear some movement in the scrub.

Even at the edge of the tree line, he was still near impossible to see.  His clothes were dark.  He was wearing a hoodie, and he wasn’t much bigger than his rifle.

“Throw it down,” Kate told him.

He looked half tempted to raise the barrel our way and squeeze off another round. We both lifted our pistols, couldn’t help but do it.  Either he weighed his options or the gun got heavier than he could bear.  Either way, he dropped it.  Didn’t toss it but let it fall out of his hands.

Then he raised his head and spoke to us.  “I’m shot.”  He had a squeaky pre-adolescent voice.  He looked maybe ten to me. 

“Don’t you move,” Kate told him.  I could depend on her not to go soft on a kid, to remember that he’d just shot up the house she was in and probably had something to do with us sharing a room with a dead Gruber.  “Don’t even twitch.”

He did twitch though.  He couldn’t help it.  It happened when he blubbered.

I went down while Kate kept an eye on him.

“Anybody else out there?” I heard her ask once I’d gained the back porch.

He told her, “No ma’am” in a tone that almost made him sound raised right.

He was smaller than he’d looked from upstairs. I pulled back his hood to confirm what I’d suspected.  He had a mop of brown hair.  He was just a boy.

“Where are you hit?” I asked him.

He pointed at his left arm.  At his left leg. At his foot.  I frisked him a little and came up bloody. 

“Can you walk?”

“Yes sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dale.”

“Dale what?”

“Dale Yount, sir.”

“You the only one here?”

“Yes sir.”

“Where did everybody go?”

He shook his head.  He told me, “I don’t know.”

“You’re not much of a liar.  I’ll say that for you.”

“Yes sir,” was all he could think to tell me back.

“All right Dale Yount,” I said.  “Come on.” 

His rifle was a bolt action Remington, a .308 by the looks of it.  More gun than he could ever hope to use to much effect.  I carried it along behind him as he made his way toward the back steps.  His pants were shiny with blood, his hoodie a little too.

Kate met us in the kitchen.  She had to frisk him as well for herself before she could see fit to put her Glock away.

“Dale Yount,” I told her.

“What the hell were you doing?” Kate asked him.

“Shooting, ma’am,” he told her.

She cuffed him once to the side of the head with her open hand.    He cried some more as a result.

I told Kate, “The boy’s shot.”

“Good,” she said and smacked him another time.

He looked at me like he’d decided I was supposed to stop her.  I felt an itch that way but then I thought of the guy in the tree and Rita and L.  I didn’t hit him myself, but I just gave him a shrug and looked on as Kate drew back and popped him once again.

“I’m shot!” he told her.

“Not enough,” she said.  “Let’s get him up here.”  Kate pointed at the dinette.  “Start taking off pieces of him until he tells us what the shit’s going on.”

It seemed as good a thing as any to try, though I did half fear Kate might lop off a hand or cut out his appendix.  Especially once she started digging through the drawers in a fury in search of a knife. 

I grabbed the boy by the shirt front and hoisted him onto the dinette.  He started yelling like children do, and that was enough to draw Maurice out of the car.  That and the fact there’d been no gunfire for a good ten or twelve minutes.

He said, “Hey,” from the front porch to see who was left standing.

I held Dale Yount down as I told Maurice, “Back here.”

I can’t imagine what he thought once he found us in the kitchen.  Me holding a crying bloody child flat on the dining table.  Kate rifling through the drawers.

“You got a knife?” she asked him.

Maurice nodded and produced a jackknife from his pocket.

“Sharp?”

“No point in it otherwise.”

She opened it up and tested the blade, drew blood from her thumb.  “We can probably cut off anything with this.”

Dale Yount wailed and blubbered some more.

“I know him,” Maurice told us.  “Stole so much shit out of Shorty’s they wouldn’t let him come in no more.”

“Pope’s boy?” I asked him.

“Don’t know about that,” Maurice told me.  “Can’t ever tell with this crew. All tangled up and shit.”

“Who killed the guy upstairs?” Kate asked the kid.

I could tell by the way he looked at her, he didn’t know a guy was dead.  Not somebody upstairs anyway and in the actual house. He shook his head.

“Who lives here?”

He gazed around like he was trying to figure out exactly where he was.

“Where did everybody go?”

The boy looked to be still working on the dead guy a little.  He told Kate, “I think I need a doctor or something.”

“You hearing this?” Kate said to me.  “Did I ask him three questions?”

“You did,” I told her.

“Did he tell me any damn thing?”

I shook my head.

“Pull up his shirt.”

I did as I was asked.

Kate closed on the boy and showed him Maurice’s jackknife up close.  She pressed the tip of it to his cheek. 

“Ever seen anybody plug a watermelon?” Kate asked Dale Yount.

He moved his head ever so slightly from side to side.

“I have,” Maurice volunteered. “They stick an auger in it or something.  Come out with a hunk of melon.  Boy over at the IGA’ll do it for you if you ask.” 

Maurice had that meathead ability to go out of context anywhere.  It didn’t matter that he was with a bloody boy on a kitchen table and that a woman he already knew to be unhinged was threatening the child with a knife.  He could rattle on about the IGA if it popped into his head.

“I’m going to take a plug out of you,” Kate informed Dale Yount.

That woke Maurice up.  “You going to carve that boy up?”

That was really all young Mr. Yount had need to hear.  He started caterwauling, kicking and flailing all at once.  It was all I could do to keep him on the table.

“Where are they?” Kate asked him and showed him the blade in a menacing sort of way.

He was bleeding and hurt and tired and scared and should have been doing his homework but there he was on a dinette table about to get plugged like a melon.  That’s all we needed him to believe anyway.  At least I think it was a bluff.  I didn’t have to find out for sure because the boy finally started talking.  He figured he had to save himself, and possibly he did.  Kate still poked him every now and again, even jabbed his wounded places, but more in the way of encouragement than anything else.

There were five of them altogether, including him.  Four boys and her, and he didn’t seem to know what they were to each other.  Who was his father.  Who was his brother.  Who was maybe just a cousin.  And he had no useful idea about her at all.

“Who’s your mother?” Kate asked him.

“I just got them.”

“Your father?”

He struggled against me.  “Got them, I told you.”

“And they went off and left you here?”

“They picking me up on the road.”

“When?” Kate asked him.

“Whenever they come do it.”

“Tonight?” I said.  “Tomorrow?”

He just looked at me, content to wait for “whenever they come do it” to sink in.

“Where are they?” Kate asked him.

“Off setting things right.”

I think Kate would have jabbed him or smacked him around or something except for the tone he’d taken, like “setting things right” was some sort of holy scripture.  It rolled out of him the way any scrap of orthodox prattle might.  He’d been saying it for so long now, it was righteous boilerplate.

“And how do they do that?” I asked him.

He looked at me like I was simple, like there was only one method for setting things right and everybody knew what it was.

“Who exactly are they setting right this evening?” Kate wanted to know.

The boy made her in a glance understand that he wasn’t about to say. 

Kate didn’t hesitate the way most people might—the way I surely would have hesitated.  She just fell on him and went to work.  Cutting a little here.  Tormenting a little there.  He was a screaming child again in an instant.  It was a horrible thing to behold.

I was going to say something, but instead it was Maurice who told Kate, “Hey!”

The way she looked at him would have made me shut up too and maybe back out of the kitchen just like Maurice decided he’d better.

Then she turned back to the kid who wasn’t really up to torment.  He was scared. He was crying.  He told us, “Gone for that man.  The one that stinks.”

This was a smelly part of the world for people, so that didn’t tell us much.  It was like saying, “Gone for that horse.  The one with hooves.”

“What man?” I asked him as I held Kate off.  So I was holding Dale Yount down with one hand and holding her back with the other.

He shook his head.  “Smells, you know.  Like an idolator.”

That set us both back a little.  It even struck Maurice as odd.

“Like a what?” he said.

“She says a man stinking like gardenias ain’t of God.”

Me and Kate didn’t even need to think about it.  I had Dale up off that table and was dragging him outside when we heard the sound of cars on the track, saw their headlights through the trees.

It was Verle first, followed by Ronnie and Fido.

“Body’s upstairs,” I told Verle and pointed at the house.  “This one’s a little shot up.”

“They done beat me!” Dale said and went sufficiently pitiful and childlike to prompt Kate to hit him again.

Naturally, Verle was shocked.  He snatched his hat off his head to spin it.

Kate just stalked toward my Crown Vic while I told Fido, “Here.”  I shoved Dale at him.

“A live one,” Fido told me.

Dale Yount went all boyish, cringed and whined.

“He’s a perp,” I said.  “Watch his ass.”

I continued toward my car.

“Where are you going?” Ronnie asked me.

“Afton.  They’re after Leslie.”

2

A fellow couldn’t truly race out of Gullysville.  The roads were too lousy for that.  Kate was able to raise the state police halfway out of the hollow.  They had a trooper on a traffic stop between Staunton and Harrisonburg who they promised to scramble Leslie’s way.  Even flat out, he was a good half hour off.

I opened it up on the Wintergreen Road and through the Rockfish Valley.  We tried calling Leslie but just got his machine with Leslie’s breathy, “You know what to do.”

Kate passed the ride up the mountain to Afton reloading all three of her clips.  

“Go in how?” I asked her once we had Leslie’s building in sight.

“Hot and hard,” she told me like I had to figure she would.

I whipped into the lot to find the place alive with people.  Doors were standing open all over.  Leslie’s neighbors were out in force.  It was a blue collar place but for Leslie who was taffeta and lace, and there were Mexicans and blacks and white tattooed crackers all out in the gravel parking lot together.  A couple of them had rifles and shotguns.  We saw a few revolvers as well.

“Sheriff’s department,” I shouted as I rolled out of the car.  Leslie’s door was standing open too, but I didn’t see any sign of Leslie.

“What’s going on?” Kate asked generally and got a burst of Spanish back.

“Crazy fuckers.” I recognized that voice.  A guy everybody called Junie.  He had a lisp and was loud about it, didn’t care what words he massacred or who he spit on when he talked.  Back when bouncing checks was a kind of low-grade crime—before banks just turned them into occasions for overages and fees—I used to pick up Junie in a regular sort of way and haul him into the station house until he’d paid whoever needed paying.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Shit, Ray,” he told me.  “They come after him.” Junie pointed in a half-cocked country way in the general direction of Leslie’s door.  “Even got him a little.  We all heard him screaming.  And let me tell you,” Junie paused to shake a finger for effect, “that boy, or whatever the hell he is, can scream.”

There was general agreement in the lot that Leslie had some lungs on him and had done some shrieking like they’d never heard out of a man.

“Who’s up there?” Kate asked.

“Him,” Junie told us.  “One of them too.”

“The rest of them?”

Junie told Kate, “Lit out.”

We didn’t know quite what we’d find as we eased up the steps and down along the rickety veranda.  Leslie’s door was standing open.  Lamplight was pouring out along with music.  A voice I placed.  Miss Brenda Lee.

There was a man stretched out on the floor of the front room of Leslie’s apartment.  He had on a paper oversuit including a paper hood.  The sort of thing a crime scene tech might wear or a guy who painted cars.  He wasn’t Pope, but he looked a little like him in the face.  He was drawn and gaunt, still appeared severe even though he was dead.  He had the north end of a bright brass poker sticking out of his chest, and he looked to have fallen where’d he’d been struck because he’d surely spoiled Leslie’s rug.  It was a Chinese hook rug knockoff Leslie particularly doted on.  There wasn’t enough club soda in the state to get all that blood out.

We heard voices in the kitchen, one of them female, one of them a breathy, girlish approximation.

“Leslie?” I said.

“Hey, Ray,” Leslie told me.  “Late to the party again.”

He was sitting at his kitchen table getting doctored by a woman, a wide, dark Central American woman who had big bronze slabs for hands.  Leslie had gotten himself laid open.  He had a gash on his forearm that Leslie’s downstairs neighbor (as it turned out) was applying some sort of chunky and fiercely aromatic poultice to.  It had entirely overwhelmed the usual chez Leslie scent of bayberry, potpourri, and White Shoulders.  No gardenias on the air at all.  All mustard and chili and what smelled a little like garlic and raw earth.

Leslie winced as the bite of the home brewed concoction took hold.  “Hey, you,” Leslie said to Kate.

“Where did they go?” Kate asked.

“One of them’s in the front room.  The rest of them . . .”  Leslie would have shrugged if he could have.  “Out the door.”

“I’ll see who knows what,” Kate told me and went back outside.  I heard her stalking down the veranda toward the stairwell and the lot.

“Tell me about them,” I said to Leslie who’d waited—fairly patiently for Leslie—for the chance to lay out the story of his near tragedy precisely his way.

“So here I am,” Leslie started, “sitting right here, doing my toes.”

He showed me his right foot with only three of the nails painted a shade that Leslie identified as “misty aubergine.”

“A knock on the door.”  Leslie rapped on the table with his good arm.  He then took occasion to tell his neighbor.  “That stings, honey.” 

She rubbed more of the smelly concoction into the gash on Leslie’s forearm as she smiled and told Leslie, “Si.”

He just winced and went on.  “I wasn’t dressed for company.  Look at this old thing.”

In truth, Leslie was wearing one of his shabbier housecoats.  It had been quilted once, but most of the threads had long since busted and let the pattern go, so it was just puffy down near the hem and flat and hanging everywhere else. 

“So somebody knocks and you go answer.”  There was no hurrying Leslie, but I thought I’d give it a try.

“And I’m baking,” Leslie told me and pointed at a sheet pan.  It was dotted with what turned out to be incinerated meringues.  “So am I happy, Ray?”

“No, Leslie.”

“No, I am not.”

Ever since his bit in Kilby, Leslie had been organizing his life around not getting summoned or directed or instructed or guided or organized by anybody but himself.  It was an understandable reaction to twenty years of loutish guards and all the shit they’d put him through.  Now he did what he did when he wanted to do it, and that included receiving guests and answering the door.

“But it might have been Consuela here or somebody.  Who the hell knows?  So I got up from the table, and I went.”

“Hortensia,” the woman told him and shoved more poultice in his wound.

Leslie cringed.  Leslie told her, “Si.”

“Ray!”  It was Kate outside, down in the lot.

“Can you pick it up a little,” I said to Leslie.

Leslie huffed at me.  He was an enormously accomplished huffer.

“Kind of want to catch them while we can.”

He waved me off with his good hand.  No aubergine there, just lacquer with a pinkish hue and an impeccable manicure.

“There was this lady at the door.”

“Describe her.”

“Little thing.  Hair in a bun.  Oxygen.”  He laid his first two fingers to his nostrils.  “Had a tank in one of those bags.”

“What did she say?”

“Said she was looking for some friend of hers.  Gave me a name, Maureen or something.  She had my number, my address written on a piece of paper.  I told her I didn’t know her friend, that I’d been here for years.  Then she got all wheezy like she was going to pass right out.  I mean what in the world else could I do but let her in?”

"So you opened the door?”

“Ray!” Kate was screaming now.

Leslie nodded.  “I was walking her to the sofa when they all came in behind her.  It was a fright, Ray.  I will tell you that.   To turn around and see those boys all dressed like bug men or something.”

“All like the guy out there?”

“Ray!”

Leslie nodded.  “She sounds mad.”

“How many of them?”

“Three guys, plus her. And one of them had a knife.  Big, shiny thing.  She starts going on with some kind of Bible gibberish.  I was getting the feeling it wasn’t a friendly visit.”

“So you went for the poker?”

“Couldn’t reach the shotgun.”

“You don’t even have a fireplace.”

“Found it at the Goodwill.  Never know when I might move.”

“So you stick it in that guy.” I motioned toward the front room.

“Hit another one first.  The one with the knife.”  Leslie contemplated his salved forearm.  “Stuck the one I could stick.  The rest of them skedaddled.”

“Ray! Goddammit!” I could hear Kate stomping up the steps by then.

“Lucky man,” I told Leslie. He’d seen their work.  He knew.

Leslie nodded.  He quivered as he exhaled.  He found my forearm with his good hand.  “Know what I learned, Ray?” He managed to give me a clammy massage as he spoke.

I shook my head.

“That this life of ours is a precious, fleeting thing.”  He took my hand in his.  Grew teary.  I only pulled away once Leslie had raised my knuckles to his face and slobbered on them.

I heard the screen door creak open and bang shut.

“Ray!” Kate snapped from the kitchen doorway. “We’ve got ‘em if you’ll just come the fuck on.”

“Godspeed!” Leslie told us.  He tried to stand up to do it, but his neighbor with the massive hands jerked him back into his seat.

The trooper had found the place by then.  We gave him some hurried, sketchy details. 

“Dead guy up there with a poker in him.”

He spat and said, “All right.”

––––––––

Kate had heard from the neighbors in the parking lot that they were driving a rollback truck, all of them packed into the cab of the thing.

“One of the guys followed them,” Kate told me as I pulled into the road.  “They went down some back ass country road with a stream at the bottom.  Know it?”

I nodded.  “Burke’s Ford, probably.  Can’t use it this time of year.  It’s a mud hole.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“You’re thinking they’re stuck down there?”

“That’s what I’m hearing.” Kate checked her clip.  “Turkey shoot,” she told me and smiled.

I’d turned off the blacktop onto the Burke’s Ford Road by then.  It was rough and rutted and swung down the face of what we called Middle Mountain, a squat hillock between two more authentic runs of ridge line.  Nobody much lived along that road.  There was a pasture halfway down and a Church of the Brethren—a big brick thing that looked like a mausoleum—at the far end where the gravel went to asphalt.  Otherwise the road had woodland to either side except down at the bottom where it crossed Burke’s Creek.  The ford served well enough most of the year, but all the Afton locals knew better than to try to drive through it come June. 

It was partly a natural problem.  Springs floods carried a fair bit of the rock away.  But it was largely a local manmade problem.  There was a family of Howells down past the church who dug rock out with their loader.  They sold it by the truckload to folks in Keswick as Shenandoah River stone.  They started in mid-May and had usually hauled it all by June.  The trouble was they just left mud behind with precious few stones in it, so the creek looked like it was fordable until you went up to the axles.

You almost had to live right around Afton and Middle Mountain to know not to cross through Burke’s Ford between mid-May and, probably, July when enough rock would wash downstream to hold you up again.  I didn’t know where the Younts were from, but it was clearly somewhere else because we could hear their truck mired up long before we saw it.

I stopped just shy of the final bend that gave onto the creek, and me and Kate climbed out of the car and convened at the front bumper.  That rollback engine was roaring so that I knew the truck was burrowed.

“Want Verle or Ronnie?” I asked Kate.

She shook her head.

“I’ve got cuffs for the boys.” I showed them to her.  “Them first and then her.”

“And if they run?”

“Doubt they will if she can’t.”

“Right,” was all she told me and not in an encouraging way.

When we came walking around the bend and they saw us in the moonlight, both of those boys lit out.  Not away from us.  That was the startling thing.  The one in the truck and the one trying to push it, they spied us at the same time and both came charging up our way.  The one in the cab brought a knife out with him.  The big shiny blade, I had to think, that Leslie had already seen.  The other one was still wearing his paper suit with his paper hood pulled up tight.

We’d shown up aiming our pistols at them, so there wasn’t much to do but say, “Stop.”

Of course, they didn’t stop.  They didn’t even slow down really.  I was going to tell Kate to shoot them in the legs since she was the one of us with some aim, but she went ahead and did that on her own. Depending on your definition of “legs.”

She made the tactical decision to take out the one with the knife first.  Kate hit him in the upper thigh.  Once probably would have done it, but she squeezed off a four-round grouping you could have covered with a coaster.  He had no solid femur left after that.  Not much of an artery either.  He went face-down in the creek, just toppled straight over, and the other one kept on coming.  Not in a rage exactly but sort of like a zombie would. 

He ran right at us.  Kate, to her credit, didn’t gun him down.  Instead, she stepped aside like a bullfighter as he charged our way and caught him hard across the jaw with her Glock.  That staggered him.  I kicked him once, caught him flat on the forehead.  He didn’t come back at us after that.

We didn’t know where the woman was.  She could have been drawing a bead on us by then.  Kate kept an eye out for her while I cuffed the fellow at our feet.  He looked like Pope to me, the one we’d seen before with the wrecker.   Kate and I went down to the creek and together dragged the dead one up into the road.

“You kind of blew him to pieces,” I said to Kate.

She told me, “Guess I kind of did.”

So I shouldn’t have been at all surprised by what happened presently, and looking back, I don’t suppose I am.  At the time though, I was charged up too and just ready to get it all over, to finally hear from this woman what in the name of sweet Jesus she’d been up to and especially I was hoping for some variety of why.  I had a raft of questions for her, for Pope once he woke up as well.  I needed to know about the pickled pancreas, the Marvin Gaye, the clothes, was craving a full accounting of their peripatetic butchery.  I wanted every ghastly little thing explained at length to me. 

So I was relieved when we waded into the creek and didn’t find that woman in the truck but saw her perched as nice as you please out in the moonlight on the far bank.

She was sitting on a grassy hummock, her oxygen tank alongside her.

“Hands,” Kate told her, and she held both up, showed us her pale palms.

I was looking around to make sure we were out of Younts otherwise.  I glanced back to see that the one called Pope was still down and out on the far bank.  It was just her and just us upright and conscious.  We walked to her through the muddy stream until we were standing eight or ten feet from her, the both of us still in the water up to our shins.

She didn’t appear the sort of woman you’d look at twice.  She was small and had enough skin left hanging to suggest that she’d been pudgy.  Her glasses were unflattering.  Her hair was gray and dull.  She was wearing some sort of shapeless shift and shoes so ungainly and ugly they had to be orthopedic.  Just to see her was to know I didn’t understand a thing.

Then she got proud, and I have think now that was her undoing.  She smiled in a satisfied sort of way, as if she had much to tell and, when the time was ripe and the cameras were rolling, she might even see fit to tell it.  It was plain that was what she wanted.  She was haughty enough to be transparent.  She wasn’t a woman who’d be talking to the likes of us.

I guess since Kate couldn’t stop what had happened already, she decided to stop what would come.

The woman was opening her mouth to tell us something—probably that she would be telling us nothing—when Kate raised her pistol and fired one time. I nearly levitated. The bullet passed clean through that woman’s head and splattered gore out the back. 

“There,” Kate said, like anybody might say, “There,” once a job was finished.  Then she swung around and pointed her pistol at me. 

I don’t know if she was nursing a thought about taking me out as well or if she just brought the gun around because she’d turned to look my way.  All I know is I was staring down the barrel of Kate’s Glock.

She seemed a little dazed.  Who could blame her?  That Yount woman finally pitched on over.  I could hear the clatter of her oxygen tank as it tumbled down the bank. 

Kate hit the release on her pistol and let her clip drop into the water.  She pulled back the action to clear the chamber.  She handed the thing to me butt first.

Kate helped herself to the pair of cuffs in the holder on my belt.  She locked her left wrist in one bracelet and turned so I could lock her right.

“Go on,” she told me.

I did what she asked and watched her walk across the creek, past the dead Yount to the stunned one who she said something to and kicked.

***

It turned out they were all her boys, even young master Dale.  She’d taken her sons for lovers, and a sort of theory developed that the first guy she’d killed in Idaho had been somebody to her.  Maybe some sort of boyfriend or common-law husband who’d fathered the first of the children she’d been using for breeding stock ever since. 

We found their possessions spread out in four different self-storage units in the valley.  Apparently, the clothes at Danny’s house was mostly stuff he’d pilfered and stole.  That’s what put him in bad odor with the family.  Gaylord did tests on Danny in Richmond and discovered he wasn’t a Gruber after all, just a Yount who couldn’t get with the program and had gotten away somehow.  When he came back, they finally made him what they wanted in the end.  Docile, I guess, and faithful, which Danny could only manage dead.

The grown Yount we didn’t kill, the one folks knew as Pope, spent a couple of nights at the university hospital in Charlottesville.  He had a fractured jaw that they wired shut for him, like he was going to talk anyway.  Me and Verle took a run at him there in his room, never got him to speak at all.

He was cuffed to the bedrail and was supposed to stay that way.  They didn’t have a lockdown ward.  He was up with the terminal patients, way high in the tower where they enjoyed a view of the mountains to the west.  A nurse freed him because he told her he was craving a proper sitdown, and he even stepped into the bathroom but just to get a running start.  He went out the window headfirst, took it with him frame and all.  He bounced off a couple of ledges and made it to the parking lot. It turned out he’d been watching news about his mother on Channel 9.

Young master Dale got four years at the juvenile lockup in Lynchburg, chiefly because nobody knew exactly what to do with him.  When he was presented with the chance to demonstrate remorse in a courtroom before a judge, he started in on sinners and idolators, fornicators and such and how there was a need in this world to have their kind all scoured clean.  The bailiffs had to pick him up and carry him out of the place.

Kate wouldn’t even hear of a proper trial.  She pled out to the state’s attorney.  They let her off with three to five for unlawful discharge and manslaughter.  When they were taking her off, I followed her onto the walk and to the car.  I don’t know what I thought she’d say and wasn’t sure what I might tell her.  We’d spent a crowded few days and nights together, so I figured something needed to pass between us.

It went like this.

She told me, “See ya.”

I think I told her, “Yeah.”

3

––––––––

Everett adopted Rusty in an official sort of way.  We’d kind of been sharing custody, but Everett’s solution was fine with me.

“He’s good in the car,” Everett informed me.  “All right in the house.  You much care if he just stays on over?”

Rusty had ears after all that Everett could pour talk into.  Everett ate pork ribs as a regular thing and passed the bones along to Rusty.  Rusty was allowed to sleep in Everett’s bed and lounge on Everett’s sofa.  When Everett felt like a Maker’s Mark, Rusty usually got a splash.

I thought about moving on somewhere else, catching hold with another department.  My stuff was already in boxes after all, but when I made a few inquiries, there was nothing anywhere.  Layoffs all over and budget cuts.  I got advised to stay where I was.

The whole Yount business hung with us a while, gaudy and unsatisfying.  Verle served as our face on the ordeal on news reports and magazine shows.   Folks with expertise and training aired opinions about their motives, explained away the surgery, the pickled organs, the phone calls, the clothes.  I can’t say I was much persuaded by any of it at all. 

We found the Yount family Bible at the U-Store-It out in Raphine.  It was stiff and shiny, didn’t look to me like it had ever been opened.  I let that tell me all I needed to know.

Six months later, in the dead of winter, Ronnie organized a party.  I don’t know if he was aiming to help us bury the Yount case once and for all or (and this is more likely) the get- together just happened to have that effect. 

We assembled at the quarry where Ronnie had arranged for a trebuchet display.  Jimmy, J.W., and Hank who’d built the thing, Brewster and Alice, Lomax and Onyx, Leslie in a scarlet pantsuit and a fur.  Me and Verle and Doug, even Everett and Rusty came.  We drank Jack and ginger and watched those quarry boys fling massive boulders across the way into the frozen pond.

The sweep and thunk of that siege machine as it let fly with a boulder was about the most satisfying thing I’d seen and heard in a while.  They let Lomax fire it one time, and his rock sailed high and true, landed with a crack and splash on the far side of the quarry pond.

I still don’t know much about trebuchets, but I think Ronnie was probably right that he one in the quarry could fling a cat a mile.

Kate let me know she didn’t want me to keep up with her.  She was doing her time at Fluvanna, which wasn’t but an hour’s drive from me.  I wrote her, tried to call her, but I didn’t hear from her at all until she phoned one night in order to warn me off.  I could hardly make out what she was saying for all the prison clatter.  She said she was fine without sounding like it.  She told me to leave her the fuck alone.

I drove out on a Sunday in March in hopes of seeing her anyway.  I didn’t have an appointment or an invitation.  I just got it in my head I ought to go, so I up and went.  I waited in line with everybody else.  The husbands.  The boyfriends. The girlfriends.  The parents.  The children.  We got shown into a common room that looked like a high school cafeteria.  Long Formica tables.  Orange plastic chairs.

The inmates came out in royal blue jumpsuits, Kate bringing up the rear.  She sat down across the table from me.  She looked good.  Bright-eyed.  Rested.

“Thought I told you not to come,” was the first thing out of her mouth.  “But here you are.”

I nodded.  “Here I am.”

“What did you bring me?”

I was empty-handed.  I shook my head a little.  “You look good,” I told her.  “Better than you did outside.”

“Funny thing,” she said and leaned in close to reach across the table.  She laid her hand upon mine in a fashion that was very nearly tender.  “When they shut off the lights in this place at night,” she whispered to me, “I sleep.”

That evening I sat on my porch in the groove and drank my Monday and Tuesday beers while listening to a show about Guadalcanal that Everett was watching at full volume. Then I slipped inside and managed at last to sleep a little myself.

With many thanks to Karen Koch