Perfect Victim (15 page)

At 8:32 Eastern Standard Time that night, Jamie Lou Clinger left her boyfriend's house, defiant about being late for supper, knowing her stepfather would probably take out the belt when she got home, but she didn't care.

A skinny eighteen-year-old with a nose ring and a spider tattoo on her neck, she practically skipped down the sidewalk outside her boyfriend's trailer, her head still buzzing from the kick-ass weed Brian and she had just smoked. He had tried to get into her pants, but Jamie had been strong and just gave him a little titty. She wanted to save her coochie for her and Brian's wedding night, at which time she would finally be free of her tight-assed step-daddy and chickenshit mama once and for all.

She reached the edge of the property line, turned left, and headed north on Main Street, buttoning her ratty denim jacket and turning up her collar as she went. It was a typical high Kentucky evening, cool in the hills, damp in the hollows, and Jaimie felt a little shiver of a chill as she strode under pools of yellow street lamps.

Valesburg had already tucked itself in for the night, the windows of Deforest Feed and Seed as dark as black ice, the big neon milk shake over the door to the Dixie Café turned off and swinging squeakily in the breeze. Mining towns are like that—sleepy, stubborn, set in their ways.

Established way back in the early nineteenth century when coal deposits were first discovered a mile below the limestone crags of the Shenandoahs, Valesburg was one of the more stubborn of these enclaves, clinging to the side of Avery Mountain like a calcified barnacle. Ninety-nine percent of the town's population were Pentecostal Baptists, most of them on intimate terms with tribulation and tragedy. The mayor doubled as the preacher out at the Revelation to John church on Gunstock Road, and practically every single family had lost relatives in mining mishaps.

Jamie walked briskly past a row of merchants lining the north side of town, past Doc Felton's office, past the old mining company store, past the Curio Emporium Five and Dime where she got her first ear piercing back in eighth grade (much to the chagrin of the cashier, Betty-Jean Rosseler, who had promptly called Jamie's mom—as well as the rest of the Valesburg bridge club—crowing the scandalous news). By the time Jamie reached the vacant lot at the end of Briar Street, she had decided against her better judgment to take a short cut. For the first time in her life, Jamie Lou Clinger decided to cross the barrens in order to hasten the trip home. She did not make this decision lightly. She didn't want to cross that godforsaken stretch of land, but she also didn't want to show up any later than absolutely necessary. For the last few blocks she had started dreading the promise of her step-daddy's lash, her resolve wilting like a bloom closing up for the night.

She walked over to the edge of the vacant lot, then paused, girding herself for what she was about to do.

“Oh, fuck it.”

She hopped over a low rail fence, then ascended the gentle slope into absolute darkness.

 

“Stop! Goddamnit, stop!”

Grove stood at the front window, gazing through the slats of drawn blinds at the turbulent night sky and the relentless rain slashing the pane. The storm had not let up since dusk—in fact, had worsened—and now the escalating volleys of thunder accompanied by violent eruptions of lightning seemed to echo Grove's rising mania and rage. He had been listening to Drinkwater's bizarre tale—of how those old men had come to Geisel all those years ago, believing that Grove was part of some cosmic duel, a pair of lost spirits in eternal conflict—for almost an hour now, and he was close to the breaking point. “What good does this do me? Huh?” He turned and seared his gaze into Drinkwater. “I'm hunting some kind of supernatural being now? Is that what you're telling me?”

Drinkwater stood across the room, near the fire-place, the pint bottle of vodka in her hand. She had practically polished it off and was starting to slur her words a bit, starting to wobble on her knees. “Look, you hired me to run down these old men, I ran down these old men.”

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Grove thrust his hands in his pockets, dizzy with warring emotions. A voice, maybe his mom's, maybe something else buried deep in his neurons, told him to heed Drinkwater's words:
You got the mark on you, boy, you cannot run away from it.

“There's more.” Drinkwater's voice, low and foreboding, sounded trip-wire taut.

“I'm not sure I want to hear any more.”

Drinkwater took one last swig and wiped her mouth. “I'm just reporting what I found out—just the facts, like Joe Friday.”

“That's what you call this—
fact
?”

She shrugged. “You hired me to do a job, I did the job.”

Grove went over to her, his face flushed with feverish emotion—a lethal cocktail of rage and terror. “All I want right now is to get this guy, this whack job. That's all I want.”

“I hear you, I do, I do.” Drinkwater set the bottle down on the end table. “But think about it for a second. Maybe this guy knows the same legends.”

Grove looked at her. “John Q Public?”

She nodded.

“You're saying John Q Public thinks he's a—a what? A demigod? An evil spirit?”

“If you want me to stop, I'll stop.”

“You said there's more.”

“That's right.”

“Go ahead.”

Drinkwater took a deep breath. “I talked to your mom.”

Grove stared at her, his center of gravity going all haywire. “You
what
?!”

 

The pine barrens lay on the northeast corner of Valesburg, Kentucky, a scabrous rise of weeds and trash enclosed by ancient barbed wire and choked with thick, dense groves of knotty pines and crooked spruce. From the north side of Briar Street, the area looked like an ocean of blackness that stretched all the way to the North Carolina border (although technically the barrens terminated at the county line, a mile or so away).

Local kids loved to tell tall tales about it—how it would eat you alive if you ventured more than ten feet into it, how hapless children had wandered into it only to be eaten by wolves. But Jamie Lou Clinger was smart enough not to be taken in by all those old spook stories. She was a sophisticated eighteen years old now, and she had her sights set on far wilder jungles, such as the University of Kentucky at Louisville, or maybe even Duke down in Raleigh. Duke was a party school, sure, but it was also one of the top rated pre-vet programs. It was Jamie's ticket out of this hellhole hometown of hers.

She entered the barrens at exactly 8:11
P.M
.

The first leg of the journey passed quickly—a simple traipse up a narrow dirt path through a thicket of hickories—and Jamie crossed this portion of the trek briskly, eyes forward, ignoring the droning sounds of crickets and burbling frogs on either side of her. Fireflies floated in the darkness like tiny cinders. Her feet, clad in worn Chuck Taylors, scuttled faster and faster up the trail. Her breath huffed.

Soon she found herself engulfed by myrtle and kudzu-fringed whip-weeds so dense they gave the impression she was traveling through a time tunnel. The breeze in the treetops played with the swaying shadows beside her like a puppeteer, and other, more troubling noises crept up on her. The creak of a branch dancing in the wind, the scrape of a limb against a hollow deadfall log. The flutter of something leathery in the sky above the netting of trees.

It was amazing how quickly Jamie lost all her worldly sophistication.

By the time she reached the midway point—a clearing about the size of a baseball diamond, the uneven ground lined with mossy boulders, the dark air hectic with mosquitoes—her heart was pounding. She realized the worst was yet to come, the scariest part of the trip, and she already wanted to turn back and take the long way home. How was she going to face the mine? In all the excitement she had forgotten how close the shortcut came to it. How could she avoid looking at it? The disaster that happened there decades ago had traumatized the little village so severely that the mere act of
looking
at the ruins—even from the distance of Avery Mountain—would place an inexorable hex on the viewer. It was an inexcusable tempting of fate.

I'll just walk on by, won't even look at it, just pretend it isn't even there, just a bad dream, not even real…

She took a deep, bracing breath, then began the next leg of the path.

 

Grove stood very still in the middle of his living room, the soles of his feet feeling as though they were welded to the carpet, as he listened to Drinkwater's slurred words.

“She's a beautiful lady, Ulysses.” Drinkwater stood unsteadily over by the hearth. “She loves you like I can't even explain.”

Grove felt his stomach clench. “Who told you to talk to my mom?”

“You said—”

“On the phone you're talking about?”

“I saw her. I connected through Chicago and met her.”

Grove felt the top of head coming off. “I don't understand why you thought you had to—”

“This is important, Ulysses. What she said, it all
connects
.”

“What are you talking about?”

Drinkwater starting pacing in front of the hearth, searching for the right words. “Your mom told me a lot, but the one thing she told me just about blew me out of my chair—something that happened back in Kenya, before you were born. She was scared, Ulysses. She said one day out of the clear blue sky these mysterious men show up in her village, holy men from somewhere else, priests or prophets or whatever. They kinda stalk her for a while, and she's so messed up and paranoid she locks herself in her shack. They surround her hut and they chant and pray all night, and she has these horrible nightmares, and then…the next day they're gone.”

“What are you telling me this for?” Thunder boomed overhead, resonating down through the joists. “My mom has nothing to do with this.”

“She
does
, Ulysses, she surely does. Because there were six of them.”

“What?”

“Those weird-ass guys who came to her village, there were six of them—you see what I'm saying?”

“Drinkwater—”

“These were the same guys, Ulysses, same group of old coots came to see Geisel.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“That's not even the freakiest part. The freakiest part is what she dreamed that night, okay? Because she dreamed she had sex.”

“I don't want to hear this—”

“I'm just saying, this is how it all fits. Your mom had this crazy dream that she had relations with some kind of—how did she put it?—something that wasn't really human.” Drinkwater reached into her back pocket, pulled out a small spiral notebook, opened it, and frantically paged through it until she found the entry. “‘An angel of pure white light, he came to me in the dream, he came to me and made me a woman in that dream.'”

“Stop it.” Grove felt dizzy, like he was having another out-of-body experience. “Just stop it.”

Drinkwater flipped the notebook closed and looked at him with the most intense gaze. “A couple of weeks later she missed her period, Ulysses—”

“Bullshit!” Grove batted the vodka bottle off the end table, and the bottle shattered against the wall. “This is pure
bullshit
and it doesn't help me!”

Drinkwater blinked at the sudden outburst. “Okay, I know it sounds crazy, I know, but lookit, I did some research online on the way home—”

“I told you to stop.”

“
Mitochlorians
, Ulysses. There's a term for it. It's like an airborne—what?—like a spore—”

“That's enough.”

“—that can be passed during altered states, like a hallucinogen, like in a religious ceremony, but not exactly. It's really hard to explain.”

“My dad was Jamaican, he was…” Grove's voice faltered for a moment, his vision going watery. “
Trust
me when I tell you this man was no angel of pure white light.”

“All right, but”—Drinkwater was looking at the floor as she wavered drunkenly on weak knees—“that's not what your mama told me.”

Grove roared suddenly: “My dad was a lazy-ass fucking truck driver and a coward who ran out on his family!”

After a tense moment of hard-breathing silence, Drinkwater looked up at him. “Whether it's true or not, your mom believes she was a virgin when she—”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Grove's open palm came out of nowhere, a big roundhouse that landed squarely on Drinkwater's cheek.

It was probably a blessing that she was drunk, because the impact of Grove's slap nearly knocked her out of her shoes. She lurched backward and slammed against the wall with a grunt, then bounced to the floor like a deflated punching dummy. Eyes geeked open with shock, hands instinctively raised into a defensive posture, she convulsed and then curled into a fetal position. All of a sudden her voice sounded eerily younger, like a frightened child: “
Please don't hurt me, please, please, please don't hurt me, don't hit me again, please please please please please….
”