CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (49 page)

Carla's name echoed in Sully's thoughts as he pressed on. He talked to her in his head as if she could hear him wherever she might be.
Where are you, did he hurt you, did he cut out your eye and. slice your body to shreds and throw you into a sinkhole? Carla, why did you ever come back to Georgia and lure him to these woods? Carla, how can I save you this time when I wasn't able to save you before?

CHAPTER 5

Jamison, Georgia, a sleepy provincial town lying northwest of Atlanta a hundred and ten miles in one of the Appalachian Mountain hollows, predominately prospered from the sale of raw wood and lumber from the vast coniferous and broadleaf forests. Of farmers, there were few doing their best in harsh economic times by trying to eke out a living planting cotton or peanuts.

All around the town of Jamison rose forest-glutted mountains shooting into the sky until their craggy peaks pierced low gray-bellied clouds. Each mountain was named, but naming them did not mean the inhabitants knew the terrain.

Burdock Mountain rose north of Jamison, its pocked sides choked with conifers and bathed in blue shadows. Burdock's rugged landscape was unknown except to the hardiest and most adventuresome wild game hunters. Clean, sweet-tasting streams, virtually un-fished, rushed from Burdock's peak to its gently sloping foot. In the denser parts of the forest, rock ledges sheltered animal lairs left unexplored since before the time the white man sailed from the Old World. It was to this lonely, haunting mountainside Lansing urged his captive. Carla prided herself on physical strength and resolve, but it was as if she were an amateur taken advantage of by a seasoned world champion. She might as well be a hobbyist biker in the Tour de France, trying to cross the Pyrenees for all the experience she had mountain climbing. Lansing pushed them mile after impossible mile, the ground swelling underfoot more and more until they were leaning into the mountain's side.

Carla's legs ached with a punishment she had never before endured. Lungs labored to draw in each breath. Her calves squealed agonies with each step she took upward. Gravity dragged and she fell several times when unable to sustain the pace. Having known challenge before, she at first welcomed the survival chance this trek promised, but as the hours lengthened, the minutes elasticizing into infinite minutes, she felt her endurance ebbing and hope, like a fluid leaking from a cracked bottle, evaporating into the brisk mountain air.

"What is the sense in this?" She panted between the words.

"Life or death, that's the sense in this." He shrugged as if she should know better. "My life. Your death. It should be special, Carla. That's my plan for you."

"How am I special from your other victims?" She had asked this question in a variety of ways, and he had found just as many ways to avoid answering her. Slippery Moray eel, that's what she thought of him, a species of sea creature that lived in dungeon depths only to dart out without warning to bite and wring it's prey into sandy shallows.

"You remind me of someone," he said, this time surprising Carla so greatly she lost her footing and fell to her knees, scraping the knuckles of her bound hands. He paused to give her time to stand again.

"I remind you of someone?" A note of alarm caused the question to be stinging, and Carla unconsciously groped for what this new information might have to bear on her situation.

"Yes, someone I knew years...years ago. It doesn't matter," he finished harshly, jerking the rope and bringing her fists into the air until they were on the same level with her shoulders.

Carla cried out in pain before biting down on the sounds issuing from her mouth. She would not show weakness. She would not give him cause to rejoice. Her loathing for him came up like a lake of bubbling fire. She longed to rip her long nails into his other eye, feel the round globe of the

eye's orb and deliberately squeeze it in her palm like a ball of warm wax until all that was left was a dry shell. Not since she attacked him had she felt a moment's regret over her own animal violence. Uppermost in her mind was the fact he was her sister's murderer and her torturer. If she could have torn out his jugular during the fight she would not have hesitated an instant.

"I don't care if you hate me." Lansing's words floated back on a stray pine-washed breeze. "I don't care anything about you, Carla."

Carla fought back tears of frustration. She could not seem to get to him, to shake him. He made no sense. He called her special, and then he said he didn't care a damn about her. Sometimes during the trip up the mountainside she had thought of him as some species of prowling animal: swift, decisive, without emotion. Other times she had noticed he had nothing in common with the animal kingdom. He was like a robot, a computer with voice who worked from microchips and circuit boards operating from deep within the cavity of his skull. It was this
not knowing
, this complete lack of understanding of him, that infuriated and confused her.

"Do I remind you of your mother?" she screamed at him, her fury getting the best of her common sense. She hardly had the breath to spare for screaming. It was an exercise in futility, except her blood now coursed brighter and meaner through her veins. If words could be poison, she drenched him with cyanide as she yelled at his damp, flannel-shirted back.

"I never had a mother," he replied faintly.

"Good!" Carla yelled toward the mountaintop hidden by cloud above them. "Sons of bitches never do have mothers! And you're an infamous son of a bitch, Lansing! Do you hear me? You were born under a rock, and you've never crawled out, you slime creep bastard son of a fucking bitch."

The mountain and the man leading the perilous way up its humped back soaked up the venomous profanity as if it were rainwater that grew to a flood and simply flowed down and away through rocky crevices.

Carla sucked air into depleted lungs and blinked as if coming to from a blackout. Her shoulders slumped, her arms hung down before her heavily. She plodded behind Lansing, emotionally spent and physically drained. He made her hate herself. She didn't want to curse him, to fling obscenities upon his head because it demeaned her to do so, but what was she to do with her pent-up fury? She would choke on it if she did not assault him with the worst language she could remember.

"I take it back. I had a mother once," she heard Lansing say, but she was too tired to call him more names. "Everybody had a mother."

#

With Carla's final bombardment of expletives, Lansing found self-pity and depression cloak him with a suffocating blanket of gloom. He had trouble getting his breath and began to cough, softly, then more strongly.
Enough?
he thought he heard Carla ask him.
Have you had enough?

The old witch hung above him, her huge bulk blocking his escape. He was small for a boy his age, picked on by schoolchildren and teachers alike. After he learned about sex in the alleyways and streets, he locked himself in the bathroom and studiously measured and remeasured his little boy penis. It did not grow bigger when he stroked it as he'd been taught by older playmates. It just would not grow no matter what he tried. He found the old witch's white jar of Pond's face cream and rubbed it around the shaft and into the bulbous red arrow tip, and for some weeks he thought it might be working. Yet the mysteries the other boys discussed and bragged about, the stiff hardness and release he longed to experience eluded him.

Then the old witch caught him one night when he forgot to lock the bathroom door securely. She rattled the knob and the metal hook slipped from its hold. Before he could pull up his trousers she was glowering above him, her monstrous belly pressing into the tiny space between him and the door. She smelled nasty, a combination of dirty socks long unwashed, wet towels, and toilet bowls left unflushed. He zipped his fly, his gaze skittering away from her splotched cheeks and demanding stare.

"Martin, what have you been doing to yourself?" Her voice was manly and so strong it shook the window over the tub in its casing.

"Nothing." He was good at sulking. She called it "sulling up." She would come up behind him when he wasn't expecting her and bray in his ear, "You're sulling up again, Martin. You're sulling up just like a ole 'possom backed against a tree."

"If you wudn't doing nothin', then whad you have your britches down around your ankles for?" she asked.

He couldn't breathe, he couldn't move from her close, perspiring, grotesquely fat body. Was there no escape, absolutely no way to triumph, to thwart her authority?

"I was looking," he answered finally, the words all running together. " Iwuzjustlookin."

She grabbed his hand, and he knew what that meant. He struggled, digging in his heels, throwing his weight in the opposite direction she dragged him. But he was so little and she so large, a bear and a rabbit ridiculously waging an unfair war.

He averted his face, this time not even interested in the blue-yellow dance of the flames. He went slack and in his mind climbed up the castle wall to safety. From there he looked down at himself, and it meant nothing to him. The heat was pleasant and made him sleepy. He trumpeted his joy all over the surrounding landscape at how wonderfully clever he was to find sanctuary. He had never loved the old witch; he had never loved anyone. He liked some of the foster parents he stayed with, but recognizing early something was missing, maybe his heart, he kept the tiny sparks of feelings to himself.

He discovered the secret castle and looked out at the world from a secret palace window. Nothing that happened had to do with him. He observed, reckoned, chanced, and moved into position when he was asked. He ate, bathed, and passed his school tests all from a distanced vantage point. He knew hatred as other children knew longtime friends, and it was hatred that kept him alive when things went bad. He knew long before he went to live with the old witch that he would one day have the strength and power to kill whomever he wished. He despised all of humanity, for they were on the outside of his flesh. Men, women, it did not matter to him; young, old, pretty, ugly, fat, or thin, they were put on the earth for his personal experimentation, for gradual debasement, quick death, careful excising.

Carla fell and he turned to wait for her recovery. He smiled at her for bringing him back from wandering through a shadowy world. She did remind him of the old witch. She was not fat or tall. She was not illiterate or vacant-eyed. It was her passion that reminded him, and it was that reminder which kept her alive until he reached safety. He needed time with Carla. He had thought of her for four years, his thoughts revolving around her as they had revolved around the palace window when he was a child. She had become a part of his obsession, and she belonged to him for however long he wanted her.

He choked on a coughing spasm and reached for his handkerchief. The climb was arduous, and Lansing carried the duffel bag besides hauling on the rope attached to Carla. The sickness was coming back. For the past hour his hands shook so badly he kept them close to his chest, tightly wrapped around the rope. He alternately froze and sweated with feverish throes that he was yet unable to ignore. His head hurt when he let it, and he had earlier touched the bandage, surprised when his fingers came away sticky and moist from a colorless secretion.

"Can't we rest now?" Carla pleaded.

"Tonight." He took her arm and brought her upright on the slick, mossy slope.

An animal of adequate mass to disturb the brush moved noisily at an angle away from them. Lansing peered in the direction it fled. A bluejay jeered in the treetops and flapped into a cloud-studded firmament.

The coughing spasm having abated, Lansing turned his face to the mountain. Control flooded back to award him with renewed vigor. From his mental tower window he orchestrated the world, his power all-encompassing, his will dominant and unquenchable.

Light filtering down to the forest floor was interrupted by a drifting cloud cover. A wind rustled the limbs overhead into a restless song. Except for the couple toiling up Burdock Mountain, all else was still with anticipation of night.

CHAPTER 6

Sully dipped a cupful of water from one of the buckets Janice provided the men on their return. He drank gratefully, his parched throat thrilling to the chilly flow of water, his stomach contracting pleasurably.

Janice stood out of range to give the men room to refresh themselves. Flap stood beside her, his big hands in his pockets. He had been about to leave to find them when the search teams returned to Sully's house. Banks rinsed his mouth and spit, then swallowed a quart of water without pause.

The night had come quickly in the forest, defeating their search efforts until tomorrow. Sully's despondence did not seem to faze Eustus Banks. It appeared more and more likely, Sully thought, watching the older man's shiny cheeks reflect lamplight, that the sheriff looked upon this expedition as merely a wearisome job. His diffidence unsettled Sully so badly, he found he was constantly withholding criticism of the way things were being run.

"With lanterns and flashlights we could keep searching through the night," Sully tried.

Banks turned from where he was talking in a low voice to Deputy Gordon and gave Sully a measured look. "That's a plumb ridiculous idea." He pulled a small can of Garrett snuff from a shirt pocket and meticulously poured an amount in the tin cap. He just as carefully pulled out his lower lip and deposited the snuff in place next to the lower gum.

Sully had to fight himself to keep from knocking aside the sheriff's chubby hands. He fumed silently instead, his irritation climbing like a clawed animal up a tree.

"The trail might lead right on to the top of Burdock Mountain," Banks said, slipping the snuff can into his pocket, where it bulged like a misshapen breast. "Can't track up a mountainside in the dark."

"Then at sunrise we'll all go out again?"

"Yep, I figure that's soon enough. These men have missed their suppers, and they're not getting paid to traipse all over God's creation in the night."