The Girls With Games of Blood (33 page)

Bruce’s lip trembled, and he began to cry as he continued. “. . . hallowed be thy name . . .”

Suddenly Leonardo was behind him, holding him by the throat and whispering in his ear. “You gonna like it deep down in the pit, son. Lots of folks just . . . like . . .
you.
”

It was too much.
“Get away from me!”
Bruce screamed, his voice going high like a girl’s. He wrenched himself free and fled back into the woods. Leonardo laughed big and fake-demonic after him.

“Bruce!” a distant voice cried. Clora leaned out her bedroom window, waving to the departed teen. Plaintively she added, “Bruce, wait, come back, he’s just joking!”

Leonardo scaled the building so fast that he reached Clora before she withdrew from the window. “Hi,” he said with a smile.

“Don’t you ‘hi’ me,” Clora hissed. She wore only a long T-shirt, but she crossed her arms over her breasts to hide her visible nipples. She no longer felt the least bit amorous; the sight of the two men in her life facing off, and the ease with which Leonardo chased away the only one who could take her out in public, infuriated her. The rage was so spontaneous and unexpected that she had no chance to control it. “What the
hell
do you think you were doing down there?”

Now Leonardo got angry. “Maybe you should ask your friend down there what
he
was doing the other night when he and his vanilla-wafer pals tried to lynch me.”

Her anger kept this from truly registering. “What are you talking about?”

“Bruce and Tiny and Travis and David. Those names ring a bell?”

“I don’t believe you. You’re just trying to cause trouble for white folks. Why would they do that, anyway?”

“They saw me coming out your window, I reckon.”

Her eyes opened wide. Her fury choked her to the point that she could only whisper. “
What?
They know I was with a . . .”

She stopped, but it was too late. The word hung in the air between them.

Leonardo held on to the window frame and leaned into the room, forcing her to back away. “A what?” he asked quietly.

Clora blushed. “You need to go, Leo. This has been fun, but it’s time for it to end.”

Something snapped deep inside him, a thread that had been holding him back for longer than he realized. He came through the window in what felt to him like slow motion, but to Clora it seemed as if he moved faster than thought. Suddenly she was pinned against the opposite wall, his hand around her throat.

The terror in her eyes made him feel oddly warm inside. “So now the white boys know you been spreading your legs for a nigger, is that it?”

“Please,” she choked out, trying to pull his hand away. She kneed him in the groin with all her strength, but it had no effect.

“Is that how
you
see me? You telling me even the white trash is too good to fuck a colored boy?”

His use of the term infuriated her anew, and her face wrenched into an ugly mask of fury. All the humiliation she’d suffered as the little girl with ragged clothes, the one with no lunch money who had to make do with slices of government cheese, the one who got her boobs and period long before her friends and endured the assumption by everyone that she was
“loose” and “easy,” came out in one choked, gurgled, defiant syllable:
“Yes!”

It was the last word she uttered.

He enveloped her in his influence so that even as she tried to scream for help, it was choked by lust that suddenly paralyzed her and made her legs buckle. His iron grip held her in place, though, and her feet kicked against the wall as she rode wave after wave of unwanted orgasm. He pulled her close and she saw his mouth open wide, displaying his long, sharp canine teeth. And suddenly everything made sense, and she came again, and she knew she was about to die.

He sank his fangs into her neck and drew her blood fully now, the way he used to do with his victims. It pulsed down his throat into his belly, sending warming tendrils throughout his body. Clora went limp almost at once.

You fucking honky bitch,
he thought as her life coursed into him.
You redneck white-trash whore.
He squeezed her buttocks in one hand so hard he felt the tissue rupture.

Finally he drew the last of the blood from her body and let her fall. She landed in a pile of awkward limbs, and when he saw the odd way her torso seemed dented in places, he realized he’d inadvertently crushed her. Her eyes were open, coincidentally staring out the window as if she expected Bruce to come to her rescue.

He stood very still, his body absorbing the blood at its own pace. Beneath him, someone stirred in the house. The steps rattled as heavy, shuffling feet, no doubt belonging to Clora’s drunken lout of a father, climbed toward the attic.

Leonardo looked around to insure nothing remained to incriminate him. He had been scrupulous before to make sure he left no traces behind, but this time his anger had caused him to be loud and sloppy. Clora’s death throes must’ve reached the living room below.

That done, Leonardo leaped in utter silence out the window, far enough to clear the edge of the roof. He landed
in the yard below with a muffled thump, his feet slamming onto the drought-hardened ground. In an instant he vanished into the woods.

At some point, as he drove back to Memphis with the music turned up loud, it occurred to him that he’d taken no precautions to stop Clora from rising as a vampire. But he did not turn back. On the radio, a singer described his mother’s relief when his cop father survived a Chicago gang war.

J
EB
C
RABTREE KNOCKED
on Clora’s door. His head hurt, he needed to pee again, and his knees protested at climbing so far in the middle of the night. Whatever his daughter was up to, she would pay for rousing him from his fitful sleep.

He called out, “Girl? What’s all that banging about in there?” When he got no answer, he knocked louder. “You got them headphones on? I done told you about that before, you gonna end up needing a hearing aid before you’re twenty-five. Now open this door.”

There was still no response. He burped, tasted a mixture of beer and corn bread, and choked it back down. He pulled out his Case knife and snapped the blade into place; he wasn’t going to make this climb for nothing. “I’m picking the lock, girl. You better be decent.”

He slid it between the door and the jamb, then pushed the latch aside. His wife once showed him how to do that, in case Clora locked herself in the bathroom as a toddler. The door opened at once.

It took Crabtree a long moment to understand the tableaux before him. Clora lay on the floor, eyes open, her body
unnaturally contorted. Her skin was even paler than normal. The T-shirt that was her only garment had gathered at her waist, exposing her hoo-ha for all to see. Wind through the open window billowed the curtain, and beyond it a hoot owl cried mournfully.

“Clora?” Crabtree said. His voice sounded unnaturally loud in the silence.

He nudged her with one foot. She did not respond.

“Oh, honey,” he breathed. He knelt and gently tried to scoop her into his arms. When he did, her shattered spine and torso caused her to bend unnaturally, and he screamed in revulsion. He scooted back against the wall, his own eyes now wide and staring. He intended to scream, “No!” but the simple word dissolved into an incoherent cry of rage and loss, the kind that only a man who’s seen everything of importance leave him can muster. It filled the room and blazed out the window, startling the sleeping birds into flight and making his dog howl in sympathy far below. It only ended when his body forced him to finally take a breath again.

Then the next one came.

There was no conscious decision involved in any of his actions. As the gray dawn lightened the sky outside, he carefully picked up his daughter’s broken body and carried her downstairs, murmuring to her as if she were a baby with a tummy ache. When he brought her outside the dog rushed up and began barking at the smell of death.

He carried her up the hill behind the house and into the woods along the trail leading to the Crabtree family cemetery. The wrought-iron archway was all that remained of the once-immaculate landscaping. Beyond it were a dozen rows of tombstones, most too worn to be read, all overgrown with weeds and vines. Except one.

That one was still white and shiny, its name and dates plain. He placed Clora on the ground beside her mother’s grave, carefully arranging the T-shirt to protect her modesty. The dog continued to yap at the corpse.

Crabtree put his hand on his wife’s tombstone. “Your baby’s coming to see you, honey,” he said to the marble. “She shouldn’t be, but then again, you shouldn’t have been taken away from her, either. Reckon God’s to blame for everything.”

He knelt and kissed Clora’s already-cold cheek. “I’ll be right back, honey.” Then he kicked the dog as hard as he could, sending him yelping off into the underbrush.

In a few minutes he returned with a shovel. The sun was fully up by now, though it hadn’t yet cleared the treetops. Insects buzzed in the air as he dug into the hard, dry ground beside his wife. The difficulty did not register. His wife had died in a hospital, and a professional dug her grave with a backhoe, but there would be no hospital for Clora.

By the time he finished he was barely able to stand. Drenched in sweat and shaking from adrenaline, he climbed from the irregular hole and again picked up his shattered daughter. Humming “I’m a Little Teapot,” the song she most loved as a baby, he carried her into the hole and tenderly placed her on the ground. Belatedly he closed her eyes, having to chase away the gnats already swarming to them.

It took a fraction of the time to fill the grave. He shaped the fresh mound with the shovel, making it as neat as he could. Clora deserved that.

He leaned on the shovel and looked over his handiwork. The dog skulked up behind him and lay down at his feet.

He stretched and yawned. There was no time to rest yet. One more task remained, something only the father of a murdered child could appreciate. He knew who was behind this, knew where to find him, and knew what must be done. He
grabbed the appropriate tool, let the dog jump into the truck’s passenger seat, and climbed behind the wheel.

A short time later he knocked on the door. He kept up a steady rhythm, and eventually he heard a voice say, “All right, just a minute, hold on.”

The door opened and Bruce Cocker stood there, eyes red from sleep and probably other things. He was shirtless, his tan torso gleaming with sweat in the heat, and his hair was a tousled mess. It was easy to see what Clora liked about him: even this way he was a handsome young man, and with a shower and some fresh clothes he must’ve been irresistible.

“You looking for my dad?” Bruce said through a yawn. His head pounded like John Bonham at a sound check. “He’s not here right now.”

Crabtree’s voice was soft and steady. “No, you little shit. I’m here for you.”

He slammed the two barrels of the shotgun into Bruce’s mouth so hard they dislodged most of his front teeth. He pushed him back into the nearest wall. Gagging, Bruce’s hands grabbed for the barrel.