The Highway (17 page)

*   *   *

At that moment his e-mail chimed again. Cody looked up to see that the message had been sent from [email protected].

The subject line read: THE CHURCH OF GLORY AND TRANSCENDENCE.

He mouthed, “Oh,
shit.
”

Then, to Jenny and Cassie: “I’m going to gear up and drive down there. I want to talk to this trooper before too much more time passes.”

They argued about him driving, and Jenny agreed that Cassie should drive Cody’s pickup. He nixed it.

“We’ve had this discussion,” Cody said, forwarding the e-mail to Cassie’s e-mail address. “She’s going to man the command center here.” To Cassie, he said, “I just forwarded you something. Read it over and give me a call on the road. Let me know what it says and what you think.”

She nodded.

To Jenny, he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, I hope.”

As he passed them in the doorway, he said to Justin, “Call me the second you hear from them if they text or call you. I wouldn’t mind coming back and getting some sleep. I’ve got a hell of a headache.”

*   *   *

Cody unlocked the door to the room in his basement where he stored his gear and flipped the light on. The heavy-duty steel shelving was packed with equipment. There were shotguns, hunting rifles, revolvers, semiautomatic pistols, a collection of brass knuckles, fixed-blade tactical knives, night vision goggles, sets of body armor—even a Kevlar helmet.

He selected an AR-15 rifle and a Benelli M1014 12-gauge combat shotgun and propped them in the corner to take along.

Cody packed a gear bag with two .45 ACP 1911 Colts with extra magazines, night vision goggles, body armor, .223 rounds for the AR-15 and 12-gauge buck for the shotgun, binoculars, rope, handcuffs and flex-ties, a pair of radios, and several cell phones. While he was bent over buckling a holster with a 9MM Model 26 “Baby” Glock to his ankle, the door was pushed open.

He looked up to find Jenny standing there with her arms crossed over her breasts. She didn’t have a key to the room and simply referred to it as his “man cave.” Her eyes swept the contents.

Most of the items still had evidence tags attached from the Law Enforcement Center to which, unbeknownst to the sheriff or the supervisor, he had a key.

“Cody…”

“I never take anything that might be used in court,” he said. “Only stuff that’s leftover before it gets sold or destroyed.”

“That’s not why I came down here.”

“I know,” he said. “You don’t have to say it.”

“I’ll wait until you get back,” she said. “Right now you need to help your son and find those girls.”

“Thank you.”

“But, Cody.…”

He nodded, and said, “I thought you were going to wait.”

Her eyes flashed with anger.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Just promise me one thing and keep it this time.”

“What?”

“Promise me you won’t take another drink tonight. I know how you are. Once you get started, you don’t stop. You
can’t
stop. And you’ve got a head start.”

“I stopped for two years,” he said.

“Until tonight. You started drinking again when your son needed you.”

“I didn’t know it at the time,” he said.

“Just promise me.”

“I promise.” Thinking,
She didn’t say anything about a minute after midnight.

Then, as he stood and gathered his weapons and gear, he thought,
No
. Not tonight. He had a job to do. This is what he’d explained to Cassie at Jester’s. This, right here, was why he existed.

“I promise,” he said again.

23.

11:56
P.M.
, Tuesday, November 20

G
RACIE AWOKE
. S
HE WAS IN
a different place.

The floor she lay on was hard slick cement instead of vibrating steel. But it was dark, like before, except for a slight airy hum somewhere in back of her. She was in a fetal position on her side, her knees tucked up almost beneath her chin. There was faint orange light in the room, emanating from behind her, but there was enough illumination for her to see that her knees were bare and white.

Painfully, she stretched out. Her arms raised up above her head—no bindings—and her legs straightened along the floor. The tape on her mouth had been removed but her lips and cheeks were still gummy with adhesive. She’d been stripped to her underwear and wore only her panties, bra, and socks. The thought of someone taking her clothes off while she slept disgusted and frightened her.

She reached down the length of her body and slipped her hand between her legs. Although she’d never had sex and didn’t know what it felt like afterward, she was sure she hadn’t been raped.

She flopped over to her back and her naked shoulders made contact with the cool concrete floor. The ceiling was dark and without features. The air in the room was musty and there was a sharp unpleasant odor on the fringes, something old and permanent. Some kind of human odor.

She still had no strength and it was hard to connect with her own body. A headache pounded between her ears and it was so all-powerful that she thought a quick movement would again lead to nausea.

Gracie rolled her head to the right. A wall, also concrete, without a door or a window. Faint pale lines about an inch apart like tooth-tracks from a rake, swept across the surface in an arc. The wall she thought at first was pitted wasn’t pitted at all, but flecked with dark stains and paintbrushlike smears of black.

Her heart raced, and with it her head pounded even harder.

It was silent inside the room except for that soft hum, but she had trouble hearing because of the liquid pulsing in her ears as she comprehended the nature of the place she was in.

She rolled her head to the left. Danielle was there, also undressed except for her underwear—a lacy black bra and ridiculous magenta-thong panties—her face hidden by a cascade of black hair. But there was rhythmic breathing, and Gracie heard Danielle issue a soft moan. She was still alive but unconscious.

“You want a blanket?”

The voice made her jump. It was low and raspy and it came from behind her out of view. Gracie rocked back on the crown of her head, chin up, to try and see who had spoken.

“Here,” the voice said, and Gracie’s head and torso were suddenly covered with a scratchy blanket that had been tossed on top of her with a soft
whump
.

Moving slowly to not trigger the nausea again, Gracie lifted her right arm to move a corner of the blanket off her face. The fabric smelled slightly of sweat, dust, and urine. Once her face was clear she shifted her hips so she could look up and see.

The figure—it took a moment to recognize it as a woman—sat with her back to the far wall, a bare knee propped up. Gracie couldn’t see all of her because she was half in shadow, but what she saw was white and skeletal. A thin scabbed-over ankle, a bulbous knee like knotty pine, the sharp angle of a corpselike shoulder, and oily hanks of long blond hair. One eye looked out from a sunken dark socket and it was lit orange by the electric heater that hummed beside her. The heater was the source of the sound and the only bit of light in the room.

The woman shifted and lowered her knee and her leg stretched out along the floor. There was something wrong with the gesture, something incongruous about her. Gracie realized it was because the woman only had one full leg. Her other thigh, which lay flat on the concrete floor, stopped just above where her other knee should have been.

“Lost it when I was little,” the woman said, and gestured toward the door. “They took my prosthesis and they won’t give it back. Like I was ever gonna fuckin’ run away,” she said, hissing out the words.

When the woman opened her mouth again Gracie saw a dark maw with no teeth.

“Now that they got you little girls they won’t have no use for me,” she said, and a single tear snaked down her cheek.

24.

11:58
P.M.
, Tuesday, November 20

A
FTER DUMPING THE BODY OF
the lot lizard in the trunk of a car next to the house, the Lizard King stood silently on the broken front porch of the house he’d grown up in, trying to calm his breath and slow his heartbeat. He’d dropped the two girls off, hidden the body in his sleeper while his truck was unloaded, then driven home. The events of the night had been fantastic but now he wanted to calm down. He welcomed the utter and pure exhaustion that came after the rush, because he knew the next few days would be incredible.

There was a light on inside.

He thought for a moment that he might just turn on his boot heels, get in his truck, and stay in his sleeper for the night. But being back in those familiar surroundings would bring it all rushing back again, the events of the day, and he’d never get to sleep. Plus, the cab reeked of disinfectant from being thoroughly scrubbed down. So he hoped she’d simply left a light on for him or forgotten to turn it off—it happened more and more often—and he reached down for the door handle.

The house itself was close, tiny, tired, and sad. It was obscured from the dirt road out front by sixty years of gnarled and tightly packed Russian olive bushes that rimmed all four sides like medieval walls. There was no garage—not even a carport. The paint peeled on the asbestos siding and most of the shingles on the roof were cracked. There was always a certain smell around the house, sickly sweet and ancient, from the coal that was once burned in the stove to warm it. That smell seemed to live in the walls itself. But compared to the odors inside …

He opened the door and stepped in quietly and eased it shut behind him. The light came from the kitchen and it was muted and lit floating dust motes kicked up by his entry. There was a tunnel of sorts through the living room to his bedroom. His shoulders brushed against a column of boxes and plastic tubs that rose from the floor to the ceiling. He had to turn slightly to make progress. The floor was gritty with dirt.

There was a side passage off his route to the kitchen and he took it so he could turn off the light. There was so much loose paper stacked throughout the kitchen and the rest of the house that leaving a light on was a fire hazard. He was always telling her that, always complaining about the stacks of newspapers and mail, about the columns of boxes, crates, and things she called her “collectibles” or her “memorabilia” that now filled the entire house except for his bedroom, telling her that the house was a fire hazard and a health hazard because of the old groceries rotting in the refrigerator and cupboards.…

Once, during a screaming argument, he’d told her he would borrow the Case backhoe and knock the house down and bury everything inside it. He’d told her the county would likely give him a medal for good citizenship for eliminating an eyesore. She’d screamed back at him, asking, “
Where would I live? What would I do?
” Breaking down into tears and sobs that disgusted him but somehow touched him at the same time and made him soften his demand. She’d promised to clean the place out, to sell what she could and have the rest hauled away. Except, of course, for her most valuable “collectibles,” she’d said, already backing off before doing anything. Adding that she’d also have to save her “memorabilia,” like the footlockers that once belonged to his dead sister JoBeth and all the medals and trophies she’d won in high school. Those she’d have to keep, of course. But the rest: gone!

She knew she had a problem, she said. But he’d been cruel and inhuman to point it out. After all she’d done for him, she said.

That was seven years ago. Since then, the hoarding had gotten worse. He’d not seen the top of the stove or the surface of the kitchen counter in years. JoBeth’s old bedroom was packed with boxes, clothing, papers, boxes filled with grocery bags and rubber bands—packed so tight the door barely closed.

There were missing cats. He’d brought them in and released them to silence the constant rustling he’d heard deep within the piles of “collectibles” and “memorabilia.” But the cats had vanished. She claimed they must have run off. He suspected they were long dead, moldering, crushed under the debris.

The only room in the old house that was habitable was his own. Sure, it was dark and small. The things on the walls—his first set of mule deer antlers, his diploma from graduating from Livingston High, the curled and yellowing ripped-out photos of hot rods and pickups and Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders—hadn’t been updated in years. But the room itself gave him warm and familiar comfort. It was his place to gather his thoughts, to dream, to masturbate. In a brushed-steel lockbox under his bed were his keepsakes and souvenirs from his successful hunts. He knew he shouldn’t keep them, and especially not in a place so close to him. But he couldn’t help it. He’d tried to dispose of the box once—taking it out to the pasture to bury—but he couldn’t do it. The contents were too important, and nothing he’d yet encountered would arouse the feelings he got when he rummaged inside.

He blamed the intense need he had for keeping the souvenirs on
her
. That evil wormlike trait had been passed on to him.

Before she got really bad, she used to enter his room while he was away. He knew it because the sheets on his bed were occasionally changed. And once when he returned the pinups of women he’d put up on the walls were simply gone. She denied she’d removed them but of course it was her.

Now he kept his door triple-locked and never left the keys. He never let her in there.
Ever
.

He’d often wondered how it was possible to so bitterly hate someone he loved. He chalked it up to blood ties and left it at that.

He slid through an opening in the stacks to enter the kitchen to turn off the light and there she was, glaring at him through her steel-framed glasses, a shapeless and massive woman in a flower-print housecoat the size of a mainsail. She was sitting at the table. Her elephantine ankles anchored her to the floor like tree stumps.

Her face was wide and fleshy, framed in a silver-white helmet of tight curls. Every week, no matter what, she made her appointment with her longtime hairdresser in Livingston. Her hair had never changed in style or length since he’d been alive. Why she cared about her hair and nothing else was another thing about her he couldn’t understand.