Fallout (Joshua Stokes Mysteries Book 2) (2 page)

He was surprised to see Kathy and Gypsy still standing by his car. Even with all that was going on, he could still appreciate a good-looking woman and Kathy looked as pretty as ever, her pale blue eyes glistening in the sunlight; she was gnawing her thumbnail. A habit that must run in the family, thought Joshua, remembering Kathy’s nephew Junior Cobb gnawing his when he was nervous. She averted her eyes and removed her thumb from her mouth when she saw him looking at her, but did not look directly at him again. It bothered him a little, but he would worry about that another time. He had too much on his mind to worry about without adding the mysteries of a woman’s feelings to it.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone walking toward them; it was Emma Carr. She looked a lot better than she had the last time he saw her at the hospital. The puncture wounds around her mouth, where the Dixon brothers had started sewing her lips together, were barely visible; she walked straight up to Joshua. He did not know what to expect. It was hard to read the expression on her face or in her eyes.

Emma tiptoed, whispered in his ear, and then kissed him on the cheek. She then turned and made her way back toward the cemetery gate. Joshua watched her go. He glanced over to where Leonard and the others stood smoking and talking. Leonard’s shifty eyes shot daggers through Emma’s back as she went. Once she passed through the gate, Joshua turned toward James.

“We had better go, Hook. Mazy, Kathy, maybe next time we meet, it will be under better circumstances.” Joshua could tell they all wondered what Emma had said to him, but that was none of their business. As soon as he got behind the wheel, he lit a smoke. He took a long drag, and inhaled deeply. He was glad that part was over.

After they drove off, James asked if everything was all right with Emma. Joshua debated telling him what Emma had said, but decided that it would stay between him and Emma for the time being.

“Yep, I think so. Do you want to ride out to Royce McGregor’s place with me?”

“Sure thing, Hoss, I ain’t in no hurry to get home,” James replied. “Roy usually has some prime shit on hand too. I could really use some prime right about now.”

“Yeah, me too, and a good swig of whiskey,” Joshua said “You know, sometimes I wonder if those trips out to Houston involves more than just visiting Race McGregor at the prison out there. Did I tell you that was where Roy was when Tom murdered Cassie Bohannon and Joe Dyas?”

“Yeah, it seems I remember you a telling me that,” James replied and Joshua could tell by James’ tone that he had probably mentioned it more than once. There was no use in beating a dead horse.

“I just want to go out there and make sure Roy and Royce went home. I would not want them going back to the cemetery and starting something with Leonard and the others. That liquid courage they were drinking turns into liquid stupidity after several bottles. I don’t need any more crap going down right now. I just wish things would settle down to the way they were back in ‘69.”

“Things
were
simpler back then,” James agreed. “You know, it seems like when hurricane Camille blowed up through here, she brought with her an assortment of troubles, not just for those in Biloxi, but for all of us here along the coast.”

Hook’s muse gave Joshua pause to think. Hook was right. An ill wind did blow; it blew hard. It was still blowing without any sign of letting up. In fact, several months after the hurricane came through, was when Autry Reston murdered Willie Stringer.

Murders were nothing new, however those murders was still fresh in folks minds. Not just because he murdered Willie, but what went down afterward. He murdered Willie because he was having an affair with his wife. Then he hid his body behind his house under a chicken coop and an old car hood. Several days later, Reston murdered Willie’s wife Lacey when she and Willie’s sister Hannah followed him to a secluded spot along the Escatawpa River. They were searching for Willie; Reston was looking for a place to bury him. He might have gotten away with the murders if he had succeeded in killing Hannah too. However, Hannah escaped and ran through the woods to the main highway where she flagged down a trucker who took her to safety. Reston was surrounded and shot dead at his house where he had retreated to after leaving the river.

All of that went down in the spring of 1970. Then, just several weeks earlier, Emma Carr, Willie and Hannah’s niece, was taken captive, tortured, and on the verge of death by the time they figured out where she was. She had nearly become another face on the Dixon brother’s totem pole of mutilation. There had been too much murder and such going on to suit him. Through his years as an officer of the law, he had dealt with moon-shiners, draft dodgers, and devil worshipers. Even the hippy communes that sprung up when Rock n Rolls British Invasion crossed the ocean and settled in the states, but those were just phases that young folks went through; murder and mutilation were not phases.

Joshua liked to think that the world was the same as it had been when he was a boy and he and his mother attended plays and such at the Saenger Theater downtown on Saturday afternoons and church on Wednesdays and Sundays. He wanted to keep the pride and chivalry of the ‘Old South’ alive. However, it seemed that the Cavaliers were a dying breed. Nowadays, all folks wanted to do was drink and party, do drugs, and inflict violence upon others. The old guards were changing. The old ways were slowly fading into the past. It used to be that Joshua Stokes looked for the good in people, gave them the benefit of doubt. It was hard to see the good in people anymore.

The pig trail to Royce McGregor’s house was five miles of winding, bumpy dirt road that snaked through the backwoods of Moffettville before reaching its destination. In actuality, Royce’s house was just across the Mississippi State Line; however, the pig trail from Alabama was the only entrance to the property.

Joshua was glad to see Cassie Bohannon’s AMC Pacer parked in Royce’s yard. He and James got out, walked around to the back stoop, and then tapped on the screen door. Not a week had passed since Joshua had done the same thing but alone as he was searching for Roy and Cassie. This time, there was no aroma of bacon and eggs to tempt his nostrils. All he smelt was the odor of urine. Undoubtedly, Roy and Royce had been pissing out the back door since they had been on this drinking binge.

“C’mon in, Sheriff; we done as ye told us too,” Royce McGregor hollered from the kitchen table where he and Roy sat with a jug of moonshine between them.

When they opened the screen door and stepped inside, the smell was not much better. It smelt of tobacco, rotting food, and body odor. Roy smoked a pipe, most of time he smoked marijuana. Royce smoked Bugler roll-your-owns. He said he had smoked them since 1933 and there was not any sense in changing brands after all these years. Occasionally, he mixed in a little marijuana. Both had distinct odors. The ‘roll-your-owns’ left Royce’s fingers a brownish orange where he held them.

Looking at Royce’s tobacco stained fingers automatically gave Joshua pause to think of his granddaddy whose fingers looked the same as Royce’s did. Joshua quickly looked down at his own hand, but there were no stains on his. He was glad his were not stained but he knew that did not make him any better than them.

He had always associated his granddaddy’s tobacco-stained fingers to being manly and having integrity, but looking at Royce’s gray bearded scrawniness sitting slumped over the kitchen table holding his head, integrity was not a word that came to mind.

‘There but for the grace of God’ thought Joshua and hoped that if he ever got in, and stayed in the shape they were in, that someone would just shoot him and put him out of his misery. He knew that Roy had lost Cassie to murder, but he did not feel sorry for him or for Royce. Joshua did not like weakness of character in people. In his mind, laying up drunk and wallowing in self-pity was just that, weakness of character.

Roy had not spoken and Joshua could see why. He sat straight up at the table, his head slumped forward, chin on his chest, drool running out the corner of his mouth, dead to the world. Joshua debated making a pot of coffee and sobering them up, but decided he was not in the mood to baby sit a couple of drunks. They didn’t look as if they were going to cause trouble to anyone, at least not anytime soon.

“I’ll be back to check on you two in the morning. Y’all stay put until then,” he told Royce who was starting to nod too.

“Those boys are in bad shape,” James said after they pulled out of Royce’s yard.

“Yeah, they are, Hook. It don’t make a lick of sense for anyone to let themselves get in that kind a shape. If you ever see me like that,” he said seriously, “Just put a bullet in my head and put me out of my misery. The shape they’re in, they ain’t no use to anyone. They damn sure ain’t any use to themselves. Crawling though life, living in disgrace,” Joshua muttered the last as he slowed the car even more. A gust of wind across the fallow hay field to their right caught his attention. It stirred up a dust devil that swirled higher and higher and then twirled tornado like across the field headed directly toward them.

Joshua stopped the patrol car to watch. He had not seen one in a while. It reminded him of their talk earlier of ‘ill winds’ a blowing through his county.

The clear, blue, sunny skies were a stark contrast to the dust funnel that was black with topsoil it had lifted from the field. By the time it reached them at the road, it was probably at least thirty feet at its highest point and maybe that wide at the top of it.

“Damn it, Hoss! What the hell?” Hook sputtered, as he grabbed at the door handle and began rolling the window on his side of the car up. “You gonna just sit here?”

“It’s not that big,” Joshua said as he began rolling his window up. “I want to see if it would move directly over us.” He got through just in time as the dust devil enveloped his cruiser. From inside, they were witness to one of nature’s mysteries.

Hook began to laugh nervously as the car began rocking back and forth sideways then bucking up and down as the wind rocked it forward and back. They could hear debris hitting the car; see dirt, cow patties, sticks, and hay roots swirling around them. It got so dark inside the patrol car that they could not see one another and it had not done much good to roll the windows up because the inside was filled with fine brown dust.

It was as if the thing had stopped directly on top of them and then squatted down over the cruiser. Both of them felt their ears fill with fluid. Suddenly, Joshua floored the gas pedal and shot forward out of the vortex. After a little ways, both rolled their windows down so the dirt and dust would go out the windows with the suction provided from the movement of the car. Joshua and Hook were coughing and then began to laugh.

“We haven’t done anything that stupid since high school,” James laughed. “Glad to see you still got a little fun left in you, Cuz.”

“For a minute there, I thought that damn thing might actually succeed in picking this hunk of junk up and flinging it through the air,” Joshua laughed as he took his cigarettes out of his pocket. “That calls for a smoke, and when we get to the house, a swig of whiskey to wash the dust out of our mouths.”

“You look like a niggard, with all that dirt all over you. A little longer and I wouldn’t be able to see nothing but the white of your eyes,” James remarked. However, James was also covered in fine black dust.

“What do you think you look like,” Joshua laughed. “We both could pass for having put in a hard days work in the fields, by the looks of us.”

By the time they reached Highway 98, both had become quiet. They drove the remainder of the way to Joshua’s 170-year-old cabin in silence.

Joshua Stokes loved his little slice of the American pie. He had bought it nearly thirty years earlier and never once regretted it. His home was once an overseer’s cabin when over a thousand acres of the land surrounding it was the Caledonia Plantation. The blood, sweat, and tears of those who worked the land were soaked deep into the soil there. Many a morning and late afternoon, Joshua had sat on his back porch and listened to the field hollers and slave songs that reverberated from the past.

He also had several ghosts that he shared his cabin with; however, they never caused him trouble and he did not mind sharing, as long as they maintained a peaceful cohabitation. The old woman was the only one he had actually seen inside the cabin, although he suspected there was a male revenant there too.

The old woman was not interactive with the living. He saw her about the same time of day in the same areas. Her spirit was residual, just an echo of the past. The male was the one he suspected of moving things about. He figured it was a male because of what he moved. It was things like his razor, shaving mug, and comb, manly things. Joshua had even found his whiskey bottle moved from the kitchen table to the counter beside the sink. He always set it on the table when he left. Those things were minor, and they never really bothered him that much. However, the visitations he had been receiving before they caught the murderous, Dixon brothers, now,
those
bothered him.

He had never had ghosts interact with him as those had. Although he did remember having dreams of people coming into his room and trying to talk to him when he was a boy, but those were just dreams, weren’t they. Maybe they had not been dreams. Maybe they were ghosts that had come to visit him…

His thoughts always came back to his mother’s disappearance. At least they had since finding the ‘trophy room’ in the morgue of the old funeral home in Citronelle. Those boys must have learned everything they knew about killing women from their father. That old saying, ‘The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ flashed through Joshua’s mind. He wondered how such had even occurred. Did their old man say ‘look a here boys - you do it like this’ Joshua just could not fathom the how, why, when, or where of it. It was not like taking a boy hunting for the first time. Well, maybe it was, except they were hunting woman flesh instead of deer or squirrel. The thought of his mother being victim to those boys’ father all those years ago sickened him. He hated to think that she had suffered. That was worse than her just disappearing.

Joshua let out a sigh as he turned into his drive. James looked over at him.

“You need a vacation, Hoss,” he said. “As soon as all of this is over, we need to go on that fishing trip we planned.”

“Yeah, and we will one day, Hook, just as soon as I can get away.”

“I’m holding you to it,” James replied.

Once home, Joshua went inside, got the bottle of whiskey off the table and two short glasses out of the cabinet. When he walked back out onto the porch, James was staring at the blood stained floorboards beneath the swing.

“I know you’re gonna miss old Jack,” James said solemnly. “I got a litter or pups that are about ready to be weaned from the teat. You ought to come by and pick one out before I give them all away.”

“What kind?”

“Heinz 57,” James said with a chuckle. “You name it they probably got it in ‘em.”

“I might just do that,” Joshua replied. “I knew Jack was getting old. Funny thing was, I had just thought of breaking in a replacement right before that happened. I just never figured he would go out at the hand of a lunatic. I figured he would die of old age, right there in that swing, not with his throat slit.”

“None of that shit was natural, Hoss. Cutting women up, and all that other shit; it just wasn’t right. Folks is crazy though. They surprise the hell out of me all the time.”

“Did I tell you that I saw Jack’s ghost afterward.”

“Uh-uh, no you didn’t!”

“Yeah, I did. It shocked the hell out of me too. When I come to the door, he was sitting there wagging his tail, and then when I was driving out the driveway, he was running alongside the truck.”

“No shittin’”

“No, I wouldn't joke around about something like that. I haven’t seen him since then though. I just hope he is all right. He looked happy enough chasing me out the drive that night. He didn’t appear to be in any pain.”

“Nah, he ain’t in no pain. He’s in a much better place,” James said thoughtfully. “The good book says that dogs don’t have a soul, but I don’t believe that. I believe all dogs go to heaven. Well, at least the goods ones do, same as good people does.”

“I feel the same way, Hook,” said Joshua sadly. “I know they got souls, because I know they are aware of your feelings. You can see it in their eyes when you talk to 'em. When they are happy, you can see it and when they’re sad, you can see that too. They have to have something like a soul to have feelings.”

“Uh huh, they sure do” James replied, pouring some whiskey and lighting a smoke.

“If I do get one of those pups of yours, I’ll have to pick out a moniker for him. You haven’t done named them have you?” Joshua asked as he poured himself some more whiskey and then lit a cigarette.

“Nah, but I’m sure Jim’s young'un has done named all of 'em something by now.”

“Is that your grandbaby?”

“Yep, she’s four years old now, and has named every critter on the place something. She named one of my goats, Aurora after the Sleeping Beauty movie. She said because it was sleepy all the time,” James laughed. “And another one she named Bambi soon as it was born. I told her Bambi was a deer not a goat. She said, ‘but pawpaw, he sweet, he couldn’t stand up like Bambi.’ Kids, they can be cute when they’re little.”

“Yep, when they’re bigger too,” Joshua replied, thinking of Emma Carr. Emma was a sweet, young girl and if he had a daughter, he would not mind her being like Emma. He was glad that he had been able to save her life and that her head had not ended up on the shelves of the trophy room in the mortuary. Thinking of Emma caused him to think of what she whispered in his ear. If he did not feel justified in killing Tom before, he did now. Any son-of-a-bitch that would molest his own niece deserved a lot worse than what he got. He should have been strung up by his balls!

Joshua knew that was what Emma meant when she said she was glad he killed
him
; she was not referring to the psycho brothers.

Joshua did not regret not having any children of his own. They caused worry and made life complicated. In his line of work, he did not need anything to make it more complicated than it was. He had figured that out after Francine screwed him over. Once she died, he decided he did not want a woman to be that close in his life anymore, especially with him being in law enforcement. When he put his badge on and walked out the door each morning, he did not know if he would see the end of the day.

Joshua took a long drag off his cigarette and stared through the trees toward the river. From the position of the sun, he guessed it was about 4 p.m. He wondered if everyone had left the cemetery. As if reading his thoughts, James asked, “You reckon that bunch cleared the cemetery yet?”

“Probably,” Joshua replied. “I hate making you miss your cousin’s funeral, Hook.”