Kentucky Murders: A Small Town Murder Mystery (11 page)

Max lowered his hand, letting the curtain drop as Tommy and the others approached the door.

He walked over and sat on one of the two dining chairs, folding his large hands on the wooden table. Max sat and waited.

The doorknob turned slowly. Then the door flew open and hit the wall. Max was startled by the huge bang. He could see Tommy standing there and he seemed to be holding something long down along his right leg. In the darkness beyond Tommy, Max knew four others waited.

Tommy stepped inside, and the others followed, filling the tiny cabin with their bulk.

Max looked down at the tabletop.

“Max,” said Tommy, his voice low and menacing, as he walked over and stood above him. “You fucked up today.”

Max didn’t like that “f” word. His mother had always said that was a bad word and he should never use it. Whatever it meant, Max knew he hadn’t done it. It was bad.

“I was just going to have a little fun,” continued Tommy. “But,
no
, you wouldn’t play. You got all hard-ass on me. And people laughed, Max. Nobody laughs at me. Do you understand, Max?”

Max looked up briefly, then back down. The other men stood silent, waiting, and listening.

“Now we’re going to have to teach you a lesson. You’ve been a bad boy, Max,” he said with a sneer.

Max saw motion and looked up. Tommy’s hands were now out in front of him, and he held a baseball bat. Max thought of Kate and Zack going to a baseball game the next night. But it was dark out now, and they couldn’t play baseball. Then Max somehow realized that Tommy wasn’t going to play baseball after all. He quickly climbed to his feet as the men came at him like a pack of wolves.

The one called Bull dove at Max first, throwing his shoulder into his chest, knocking over the table, and breaking off two of the table legs. Max couldn’t breathe. He landed on the floor hard on his rear end. When he looked up, Tommy stood above him, thumping the bat on his hand.

The bat swung down. It crunched into Max’s left side and he felt something crack. Pain streaked through his body. One of the other men slugged Max in the face, but he couldn’t tell which one hit him. Blood ran from his nose into his mouth.

Max was just beginning to catch his breath when Tommy called out, “Remember this next time you try to stand up to me.”

Max gathered his feet under him and stood anyway.

Tommy dropped the bat and motioned the others back. “Stay down!” He cocked his leg and kicked toward the side of Max’s head. The point of his cowboy boot gouged into Max’s right ear and through to the side of his head. Max fell back. The room went bright with a white light of intense pain. Then the brightness faded before Max’s eyes, and there was almost no light at all. Max heard voices, but they were muffled, like they were far away in the distance. Tommy’s boot came down again. This time it slammed into his arm. Tommy kicked him again and again and again. By this time, the beating had stopped hurting. He was numb and oh so tired. Maybe he would sleep.

Then all the lights went out.

Chapter 20

Tommy dropped off the last of his friends. He then drove to his house, which was a mile or so outside of town. He pulled into the gravel and dirt driveway and stopped in front of the single-wide mobile home.

They were into some shit now. Maybe it had been a mistake to go after Max. It had happened again. That out-of-body experience of rage had come over him. Things had gone too far this time, and now he had a mess to deal with. Why did this always happen? He went inside, took a beer from the refrigerator, and sat back on the couch. He felt so tired.

Tommy was scared. His mother and father were in the other room talking about him. He heard his dad say,
“The boy is a little pussy. He needs to learn how to defend himself.”

He had gotten beaten up again at school. Some of the bigger boys always picked on him because he was small. What could he do? He tried to avoid them as much as he could, but they were in the same school all day long, and they were sure to find him sooner or later.

“Come out here, boy,” came from the other room. His dad was a truck driver. He was big, tattooed, and tough. Not like Tommy.

Tommy opened his bedroom door and went to the dining room where his parents sat at the table.

“What happened?” asked his father.

“I tried to get away, but there were four of them. They kept pushing me, and I fell.” He reached up and covered the bruise on the right side of his face. His mom had put a Band-Aid over the scrape.

“Boy, you gotta toughen up, or they’re going to keep messing with you. Who’s their leader?”

“Ralf Thompson. He’s the biggest kid in the seventh grade. The others will do anything he tells them to do.”

“Okay,” said his dad. “He’s the one you’ve gotta get.”

“Wait a minute, Don,” said Tommy’s mother. “I don’t want my son fighting.”

His dad turned to her. “What the hell you think he should do then? Just get the shit beat out of him every day and take it like a little puss?”

He turned back to Tommy. “You get this Ralf kid alone,” he continued. “If you can put some fear into him, then the others will follow his lead and leave you alone.”

Tommy nodded his head in agreement. He desperately wanted to do something to stop them from hassling him. This was the first time his dad had paid this much attention to him, and he was teaching him how to defend himself. He liked the feeling.

“You’re smaller than him, so you have to look for a weakness that you can take advantage of.” He spoke like a man who had gotten into many fights. “Kick him here.” He pointed to the side of his knee. “Like this.” He motioned with his foot.

“Donald!” called his mother. “That could cripple the boy.”

“Okay, okay.” He turned back to Tommy. “Then kick him in the balls. That will take him down for sure. But you need to practice. If you miss, you’re in a world of shit once he gets on you. Then he’s got the weight advantage.”

For the next few days, his dad would be home between runs. He was a long distance trucker who’d be gone for weeks at a time. He’d come home for a week, sometimes more, and then he’d be gone again. Tommy had learned to fight that week from his dad. He had taught him how to punch and kick. They practiced on a burlap bag filled with rags hanging from a tree limb. Tommy learned how to kick and hit hard, and how to concentrate his blows at a precise spot. His mother wasn’t too thrilled, but his dad kept telling her he was “just teaching the boy to defend himself.”

A few weeks later Tommy confronted Ralf. But he didn’t get him alone. He challenged him to a fight in the parking lot a half hour after school let out. He wanted everyone to see him humiliate the larger boy. The crowd gathered in a semicircle around them. It looked like half the school had turned out. As usual, Ralf was backed up by his gang of three friends. Tommy called out, “Just you and me, Thompson. They stay out of this.”

“I don’t need them to kick your skinny little ass, Tommy.” He motioned for his friends to step back. “Boys, I’ll take care of this.”

The crowd buzzed, and the circle tightened around them, giving them an area of about ten feet across, to maneuver in. Tommy took the fighting stance his dad had taught him. Ralf stood there, his weight on his heels, overconfident that defeating the smaller opponent would be a simple task. He took a slow, awkward swing at Tommy.

Tommy ducked and placed a targeted kick into Ralf’s groin area. He followed with a right cross to his jaw.

Ralf went down hard, his hands clasped on his crotch, his eyes closed with pain. He moaned.

It was over. The crowd cheered for Tommy. Ralf’s friends bent to help him, with confused expressions. Tommy moved away, and the crowd followed, patting his back and congratulating him.

From that day forward, Tommy was respected and looked up to by his peers. Groups of girls looked at him and giggled with adoration. Other boys longed to be his friend. That summer, he talked his mom into buying him a set of weights, and he began working out. By the time he was a freshman in high school, his body was becoming muscular and his confidence was peaking. When he made the varsity football team his sophomore year as starting quarterback, his legacy was solidified, and his formula for success was proven
.

Thanks to his father, he now knew that when people feared you, they respected you. He would use that principle to guide the rest of his life.

Chapter 21

When Zack punched in at the factory the next morning, he had to look twice to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. Why was Max’s time card still sitting in the “out” side of the rack? Max usually sat outside, waiting for the doors to be unlocked. He was always proud to be the first to punch in. Zack shrugged. There must be a simple explanation. He walked off to check out his forklift. He had ten minutes to pick up his first load. He didn’t have time to worry about Max.

The morning zipped by uneventfully. Zack had been so busy, he’d forgotten about Max. Thinking back, he couldn’t remember seeing him anywhere. When the ten o’clock morning break horn sounded, he climbed down off his machine and went looking for Frank. He found him sitting at a table with a few other men in the lunchroom drinking coffee. “Frank,” he called, as he came up behind him.

The foreman turned. “Yeah, Zack?”

“Do you know where Max is? Have you seen him today?”

“No, I haven’t seen hi
m
probably sick or something. If he is, there’s no way for him to let us know. That place of his doesn’t even have electricity, let alone a phone. Seems like he’s only been sick once before. A few years back. I guess he’s due.”

“Well, I’ll swing by there tonight after work and check on him,” said Zack. “See how he’s doing, you know. I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

The morning finished quietly. Zack ate lunch alone, realizing how much he missed Max’s company.

The first afternoon delivery was to Tommy’s machine. On most of these occasions, they only exchanged brief work-related conversation, but this afternoon, Tommy spoke up. “Where’s your dummy friend today?”

Zack, trying not to be annoyed by Tommy’s constant sarcasm, said, “Max must be sick, I guess.”

“That’s too bad; I’ll have to send the retard some flowers.”

Kate had told him the story of Tommy’s roses, so Zack couldn’t resist saying, “Like the ones you sent to Kate?” He backed his forklift away quickly.

Tommy’s face flushed instantly. Zack drove off laughing to himself, satisfied.

The workday finally ended, but only after Zack had put in an hour of overtime. Some big rush order had come in late in the afternoon. He pulled out of the parking lot and turned toward town. As he approached Max’s road, he glanced at his watch. If he didn’t hurry, he’d be late picking up Kate for the game. He still had to take a shower and change clothes. Anyway, he thought as he passed Max’s road, there wasn’t any reason to worry about him. He was a grown man and had been taking care of himself for years. It was probably just a cold or the flu, so Zack continued toward town, his mind shifting to Kate and the baseball game.

---

When he arrived at Kate’s house, she wasn’t quite ready. Her mother ushered him into the living room and gave him a glass of Coke, just like on his first visit. In his hurry to get there on time, his mouth had gone dry and the soda soothed his parched throat as it went down.

He sat and talked with Kate’s mother and father while he waited. They seemed nice, and they wanted to know all about him. Her father owned and ran the town hardware store and her mother was a housewife. Her parents were a bit older than his had been; hers were maybe in their sixties. Zack’s mother would have been in her late fifties by now. Kate had come to them late in life when they hadn’t expected to have a child, her mother explained. Zack told them that he was the youngest of two. He had an older sister.

A picture entered Zack’s mind. His sister. He thought of the horrible phone call she had made to him on that cold winter day a few years back. He wished that he could have prevented his mother from committing suicide. His sister’s call had caught him totally by surprise. If only he’d known …

“Zack?” Mrs. Jenkins called, trying to regain his attention.

“I’m sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “What were you saying?”

“I said that Kate seems to be fond of you, and so are we.” She turned to her husband whose eyes were fixed on the TV. “Aren’t we, dear?”

“A
h
”

“Aren’t we fond of Zack, dear?” she repeated.

“Oh, yes. Very.”

---

Ten minutes later, Kate was ready; they said their good-byes and walked out to the car. Zack opened her car door and looked up at the sky.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Looks like it might rain. That’s probably the worstthing that can happen when it comes to basebal
l
other than losing, that is.” Heavy, dark, ominous clouds had rolled in, and the wind had picked up since he’d been in the house.