Eyes of the Predator (8 page)

Kathy gave a short laugh, “That’s
Clay, the younger one. Good lookin’ boy. Lot like his daddy was.” She laughed
again and walked away calling over her shoulder, “Set right there, hon. I’m
gonna bring you some breakfast.”

“Thank you, ma’am… ‘Aunt Kathy’…
but I’ll just have some coffee,” Lyn said timidly.

“You sure? It’s on the house.”

“Yes, ma’am. I couldn’t eat right
now.”

‘Aunt Kathy’ nodded with
understanding. “Ok, hon. Coffee it is.”

Henry watched the exchange from
the booth. He couldn’t quite hear what was going on, but he knew he would get
no further chance to get close to the pretty, little thing sitting at the
counter. He snorted and walked to the door. As he pushed it open, he saw Kathy
walking back towards the counter.

“Bitch,” he muttered aiming it at
Kathy, but being very careful not to say it loud enough for her to hear.

           
Kathy brought coffee and some toast for Lyn. When Lyn had finished it, Kathy
nodded to the two young men, Cy and Clay. They stood up and waited while Lyn
gathered up her few things. Then all three went outside to an old pickup in the
parking lot. The younger brother, Clay, opened the door for Lyn. She climbed
onto the bench seat in the old truck. The brothers sat on either side of her.
Cy, the older, drove. The lights of the I-95 Diner faded as they pulled onto
the empty interstate. The truck steadily picked up speed, and the painful past
faded behind. An uncertain future loomed ahead.

Turning off the pavement, George
followed the dirt drive up to the house and pulled beside Sandy Davies’ county
issued Ford Explorer parked in front of the old frame house.

He waited for the dust to settle
and then opened the door and walked to the front porch. Sandy looked up from
the small notebook he was writing in.

“Hey, Mackey, glad you could make
it.”

“What’s up, Sandy?” George asked,
nodding politely to the elderly woman on the porch.

“Mrs. Sims here says her husband
went through the woods to check out sounds at the A.M.E. Church on the other
side. Never came back.”

“Anything else on the
description?” George asked.

“Nope. Nothing,” Sandy said, and
then added, as an afterthought, “Oh, Mr. Sims had a gun with him.”

“What kind?”

“She’s not sure. Just a small
handgun. Revolver she thinks.”

The old black woman stood, hands
clenched nervously in front. The veins in her thin arms pulsed with each
squeeze of one hand on the other. The look on her face was one of embarrassment
almost, to have troubled the sheriff with her missing husband.

George smiled up at her from the
bottom of the porch steps. “Don’t worry, ma’am. We’ll find your husband. What’s
his name, by the way?”

“Harry…his name is Harold Sims.
We all just call him Harry. Told him to just call the sheriff and let ya’ll
check it out. The old fool, he just had to go his self.”

Deputy Davies reached out and
patted her arm. “Well, don’t worry. We’ll go see if we can find him. He
couldn’t have gone far. It’s a dark night and in the woods, it’s even darker.
He probably got lost or confused a little. We’ll bring him home.”

“He’s awful scared of snakes and
gators. Not like him to stay out in the woods in the dark like this,” Mrs.
Sims, said, more to herself than to the deputies.

Sandy turned and walked down the
steps, realizing that he wasn’t all that fond of snakes and gators himself.
Before he could say anything, George spoke, “Guess, I’ll head back out to the
main road and come around the front of the church. Why don’t you go through the
woods and check it out from that direction. I’ll pick you up at the church.”

George climbed into the F-150,
grinning at the look from Deputy Davies that simply said, ‘gee thanks,
asshole.’

Pulling down the drive, he could
see in the mirror of the truck that Mrs. Sims was pointing across the yard to a
dark patch of woods where, presumably, there was a path leading to the church.
Sandy nodded and plodded across the yard towards the woods. It was clear he
didn’t relish traipsing through the underbrush in the dark.

As George turned onto Power Line
Road, unimaginatively named for the high voltage power transmission lines that
ran alongside the road, Sandy stood at the entrance to the path as if he were
trying to negotiate his entrance into the dark, closed world of the woods.

While Sandy took his first
tentative step into the black woods, George raced down Power Line Road to the
main highway about half a mile away. It was called the Jax Highway, short for
Jacksonville Highway. It was a two lane country road here, but as it crossed
the state line and neared the Florida urban areas, it increased to four lanes.

Turning right onto the Jax
Highway, it was about another half mile to the A.M.E. Church. George slowed
rapidly as he approached the entrance to the graveled parking lot. Pulling
slowly off the highway, he stopped the vehicle for a moment in the entrance and
scanned the church and parking lot. There was no movement and no other vehicle
was visible.

After getting the lay of the
land, he turned on the spotlight mounted to the  truck, pointed it at the
church, and slowly made a pass from front to back, tires crunching softly in
the gravel. The bright light glared harshly off the white painted wooden
clapboard siding of the church.

Nothing. No old man. No sign of
any disturbance at the church. All was quiet.

George turned the truck and
pointed it at the woods directly behind the church, guessing where the path
through the woods might come out. The bright illumination made the green canopy
appear almost white.

A few minutes later, Sandy Davies
stumbled into view, the light from his flashlight canceled out by the bright
lights of the truck. He brushed something off his shoulder and waved his arm
around his head as if trying to clear a clinging spider web.

Looking into the lights of
George’s truck, he shaded his eyes and walked towards it.

“How’s that workin’ out for you
there, Sandy?” he called from his seat in the truck.

Deputy Davies bent over, brushed
at something on his pant leg, and then squinted into the bright light and
flipped George the bird. He walked around to the passenger side of the truck
and got in.

“Anything?” he asked George.

“Nope. All quiet here, and I
didn’t see anyone walking on the highway.”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that
about half way through the woods. He might have decided to go back along the
road instead of fighting his way through the woods.” Sandy added as a theory,
“Maybe someone picked him up.”

“Yeah,” George replied, “or ran
him over and knocked him into the ditch. I couldn’t see that on the way over,
but I wasn’t looking too close.”

“Well, I guess you better take me
back to my car, and we can spotlight both sides of the road. Look for any signs
of an impact…or a body.”

“Yeah. Just tell Mrs. Sims we are
going to look around some, and we will get back to her. Don’t want to frighten
her for no reason if old Harry turns up after being lost in the woods.”

Sandy nodded. “Right,” he said in
agreement, “Let’s get to it I reckon.”

The two
deputies clearly did not relish the task before them. The possibility of
finding old Harry Sims lying in a mangled, bloody heap in the roadside ditch
was a distinctly unpleasant one.

George turned the truck to the
right so that it was parallel to the tree line along the edge of the woods. The
bright lights picked up a small dark hump in the gravel about a hundred feet
away.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t know,” Sandy replied
squinting through the windshield. “Get closer.”

The truck rolled slowly forward
with no additional pressure on the accelerator. The dark hump on the gravel
slowly grew in size. Its shape shifted in the glaring light and moving shadows
cast by the truck’s lights on the surrounding trees until it finally changed
from a shadowy mound and took on an identifiable form.

“Shit,” the two deputies
muttered, almost in unison.

Roydon was
considered a small town. Actually, it was no town at all and not much more than
an interstate crossroad. It was a settlement, a clustering of people for
convenience. There was no elected mayor or town council, but it did have a
hierarchy, its own system of governing. It was the unofficial center of
criminal activity for fifty miles in every direction, and the leaders of this
activity were the unelected leaders of the community. The only discernible
reason for its current existence was the interstate and the community’s various
criminal enterprises.

In addition to a very busy bar,
frequented predominantly by people seeking goods and services unobtainable
elsewhere in rural Georgia, there were two run down gas stations pretending to
be truck stops, a couple of dirty motels and a few scattered trailers and
shacks where the locals resided. These made up the entire settlement.

At one time, it had been a center
of commerce for the surrounding farming community, as many of these rural,
small towns were at inception. But the farmers had long since moved away or
found other markets and means of transport. Pickham County was generally
considered a moderately low crime area.  Except for Roydon. In Roydon,
big-time, major felony type criminal activity was the standard, and the
settlement continued to exist mostly for the sake of the illegal activities
that took place at and around the bar, ‘Pete’s Place’.

The new Sheriff of Pickham County
had said he was going to clean the place up and had even briefly involved the
Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). But finding witnesses in Roydon was
problematic. Talking in Roydon about Roydon or its business enterprises was a
dangerous proposition. The occasional small-time dope case that law enforcement
was able to make had no effect on the extensive illegal trafficking that took
place. And the locals knew it was better to do time quietly than to speak to
sheriff’s deputies or the state patrol. Besides, they didn’t want to speak.
People who lived in Roydon, or who profited from Pete’s Place, liked things the
way they were.

Like the reason for the town,
‘Pete’ had long since disappeared. In fact, no one even knew who he had been or
where he had gone. But his bar remained and thrived.

Roydon, and Pete’s Place in
particular, were known along the I-95 corridor as being the gathering point and
base of operations for various distributors who fulfilled the specialized needs
of their clientele. These entrepreneurs provided the select inventory items and
services not readily available elsewhere. Fifty years earlier, it had mostly
been moonshine liquor. That was still available, but the inventory of goods and
services had grown. Drugs of every description and type were available.
Homemade meth to prescription painkillers, amphetamines, marijuana, crack
cocaine, heroin and every narcotic derivation known to man could be obtained
from the several suppliers who called Roydon home.

Then there were the girls.
Georgia was not Nevada. Prostitution was illegal, but in a place like Roydon,
it was just another item on the menu of goods and services. Girls were
available for the use of the truck drivers and bikers who frequented the area.
You had to know who to ask, and especially, how to ask, but they were
available.

Some were there by choice because
they could find no other way to survive, if you could call their existence in
Roydon survival. Abusive men, fathers, brothers, husbands, or boyfriends had
forced others into the trade. The stories were all a little different. The
result was the same. They lived a life underground. They were invisible. The
oldest profession, and their only means of survival was illegal. They were
hidden and forgotten, and being forgotten, they were in even more peril and
subject to more abuse. To the families on their way to Florida vacations,
truckers, business people, and military convoys passing by Roydon on the
interstate, they were nonexistent. The world preferred it that way, not wanting
to know them or the dark emptiness of their lives or Roydon’s other secrets.

The faded, old car pulled from
I-95 onto the exit ramp to Roydon. The brake lights flashed as the car stopped
at the stop sign at the top of the ramp. He looked both ways and then turned
left, crossing over the interstate.

On the other side, he pulled the
car into the parking lot of one of the filthy motels. The lighted sign said
StarLite Motel, but only the ‘S’ and ‘r’ were lit. The other letters sizzled
electrically, but their neon, phosphor glow had long since dissipated. It
occurred to the driver that he had probably seen a StarLite motel in every town
he had ever visited, and he had visited quite a few on his runarounds. It must
have been a popular name in the fifties and sixties, dawn of the space age and
all.

He had been in places like Roydon
before. He had a knack for finding them. Similar communities dotted the
American countryside. They were always filled with anonymous people and shady
visitors. In places like Roydon, questions were not asked, and names were not
recorded.

The StarLite and Pete’s Place were
comfortable to him. He could move through the underworld of Roydon without fear
of prying questions or watching eyes. Averted gazes and deaf ears were the norm
in a place like Roydon.

Reaching down, he checked the tie
wraps holding the girl’s wrists together and binding her to the frame under the
seat. Her position was awkward and uncomfortable. She was forced to lean over
on her side so that her head was not visible to passersby. The pleading eyes
peering at him above the duct taped mouth made him smile.