Threshold (37 page)

“Holy
shiiiit,
that was a ripe tomato,” the hitchhiker cackles from the passenger seat, laughing like a madman, a high and delirious laugh.

“You just shut the fuck up!” Deacon growls at him. “We almost fuckin’
died
back there, for Christ’s sake!” but the car has stopped swerving, is sailing along straight and smooth under the blue summer sky as if maybe it’s decided to contradict him, angry about the radio knob, and so it’s decided to take the hitchhiker’s side.

“Hey,
you’re
the one ran over the son of a bitch,” the man says and stops laughing, goes back to shuffling his tarot cards. “Don’t be yelling at
me
’cause you weren’t looking at the road.”

The cloying, sicksweet smell of roadkill so bad that Deacon’s eyes are watering, and he swallows hard, trying not to taste it but tasting it anyway. He steals a quick peek in the rearview mirror, but whatever’s left of the dog is already too far behind them to see.

“You still got a long, long ways to go, Mr. Silvey, and you ain’t never gonna make it at this rate.”

Deacon starts to say something, ready to tell the man exactly where he can stick it, ready to pull over and let his smart-ass, spooky brains sizzle in his skull like a skillet full of scrapple and eggs, when he realizes that he hasn’t told the hitchhiker his name. The tall man never asked, and Deacon’s pretty sure he didn’t volunteer the information. He stares through the windshield at a ragged scrap of flesh caught on the hood of the Chevy, something dark and greasy that might be one of the dead dog’s ears.

The hitchhiker shuffles his cards and sighs.

“Oh, I can tell you got some of the sight about you, so don’t look
too
surprised. Just a glimmer, sure, not like that little albino bitch. That girl was a goddamn searchlight. She’d just as soon blind you as give you the time of day.”

Not another car on the road as far as Deacon can see, not a house or a service station in sight, and it could easily go on like this for miles and miles. He licks his dry lips and puts more pressure on the gas pedal; if he’s lucky, there might be a highway patrolman with a radar gun somewhere up ahead.

“You been trying to keep your head down all your life, ain’t you, Deke? You never did want any part of this hocuspocus. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“I didn’t ask for it, if that’s what you mean,” Deacon says. “But that really hasn’t made a whole hell of lot of difference, has it?” The Chevy’s accelerator is halfway to the floorboard now, and the car races over a short bridge, a narrow, nameless creek fringed with bald cypress trees and Spanish moss. Deacon thinks he sees something moving about in the dark water, a shapeless mass gleaming wet in the sun, but then the creek’s behind them and the man’s talking again.

“No, I don’t suppose it has at that. But sometimes a fellow’s just got bad shit coming to him, whether he deserves it or not.”

“Did Dancy Flammarion deserve it?” he asks, and the man clicks his tongue twice against the roof of his mouth and turns another tarot card.

“You better slow this junk heap down a bit, or you’re gonna be spending the night in some cracker’s pissant jail.”

“That’s sort of what I had in mind.”

The hitchhiker clicks his tongue again, something cold and insectile in that sound, cold despite the heat of the day, and “This card,” he says, “well, never you mind this card. You
know
you got a choice. You’ve always had a choice. All you have to do is forget about the albino and all the rest of this crazy shit, go back to that smart girl of yours in her great big ol’ house and pretend like none of this ever happened. See that she does the same.”

“Just like that,” Deacon says, and the Chevy has to be doing almost ninety by now, at
least
ninety, the way its front end has started to rattle and shimmy like it’s ready to fly apart, and the steering wheel is beginning to shake in his hands. “Look the other way and I’m off the hook. It’s that easy.”

“I never said nothing about
easy.
Hell no, forgetting the messy truth of things ain’t never been easy, but you and Chance might live a lot longer. It’s your call, Deke. Your choice. You just don’t look much like hero material to me. Let sleeping dogs lie, if you get my drift.”

The man smiles, flashes all those sharp yellow teeth, and then Deacon’s coughing again, the air inside the Chevy suddenly so full of red dust that he can hardly see. He takes his foot off the gas and hits the brakes hard and realizes that the car is already sitting perfectly, impossibly still as the engine sputters and stalls and is silent. The stereo’s still blaring, the stereo and the rise and fall of the cicadas screaming in the trees, and he peers through the choking dust, through the windshield at the faded Pepsi billboard, and he doesn’t have to look twice to know that it’s the
same
billboard, that he’s no more than a mile past Red Level. There’s nobody else in the car but him and no knapsack or homemade cardboard sign in the back, either. But there’s a single tarot card on the seat beside him—the Tower—and Deacon sits and stares at it while the dust settles and the sun melts its way slowly towards the west. If there’s no other mercy in the day ahead, at least the card has nothing more to show him than the gaudy mystic’s colors of its face.

Twenty long minutes waiting for the man that Vincent Hammond’s sent him all the way to Florida to see, twenty minutes sitting on a bench in the lobby of the Milligan Courthouse, footstep echoes on the marble floors and occasional, suspicious stares from the people coming and going. The men and women dressed like they belong here, gray suits to remind him that he doesn’t, and Deacon nods at each of them politely and smiles, spends the rest of the time reading a gold-framed reproduction of the Bill of Rights hanging on the wall. He’s still reading it when someone calls his name, and he looks up to see a pudgy black man with a gray mustache and an ugly yellow tie walking quickly towards him.

“Mr. Silvey?”

“Yes sir. That’s me,” and Deacon stands up, holds out a hand, and the man shakes it.

“I’m Detective Toomey. You know, you’re not exactly what I was expecting,” the man says and tugs anxiously at his yellow tie. “The way Lieutenant Hammond talked, I thought you’d be a lot younger.”

Deacon shrugs, uncertain what he should or shouldn’t say to that, and then Detective Toomey rubs at his eyebrows like someone with a headache, eyebrows as gray as his mustache, and “Well, that’s really neither here nor there, now is it? Why don’t we step outside?” He motions towards the courthouse doors.

“Sure,” Deacon says, “that sounds good to me,” and he follows the policeman back out into the afternoon sun. There’s another bench not far from the courthouse steps, and they sit down there.

“Bet you it don’t get this damn hot way up there in Birmingham,” Detective Toomey says, and Deacon glances up at the sun; it seems much closer than when he left Chance’s house this morning, a spiteful white thing sagging dangerously close to the ground.

“No sir. Not very often.”

“When I retire, I’m gonna pick up and move all the way to Canada. I’m not gonna stop until there’s snow so deep you need a bulldozer just to get from the front door to the mailbox,” and Toomey wipes his face with a white handkerchief from a pants pocket.

“Right about now, that’d be fine by me,” Deacon says, just wanting to get past the chitchat, get to the point, because he’s never been any good at small talk, especially small talk with cops.

“Yeah. Snow and icicles long as my arm,” and the detective stuffs the sweatstained handkerchief back into his pants. “So, tell me, Mr. Silvey, how can I help you today?”

“Hammond said you might be able to tell me something about a girl named Dancy Flammarion.”

Toomey rubs at his eyebrows again and turns away from Deacon, gazes across the courthouse lawn towards a bronze statue of an Indian on a granite pedestal.

“Right, the albino girl. Fifteen years as a cop and you see some shit, Mr. Silvey, even way out here in the sticks, you do see some shit. But, well, there’s the shit and then there’s the depraved shit. And
then
there’s things like Miss Flammarion. Jesus.”

Deacon waits while the detective stares silently at the bronze Indian, wide bronze shoulders streaked with verdigris and pigeon crap, and in a moment the man turns towards him again and smiles a tired, nervous smile like someone with something to hide, someone with secrets.

“That was my case. Not one of the ones I like to spend too much time thinking about, though. One of the ones I’d just as soon forget, to be perfectly honest. I was there the day Officer Weaver brought the girl in from the swamps. And let me tell you right now, just the time it took him to get her here from Eleanore Road, she’d already done a number on that poor man’s head. Thought for a while he was gonna quit the force after that, and he
still
won’t talk about it much.”

“Eleanore Road?” Deacon asks, and Toomey nods, points to the north, past the courthouse.

“Yeah, that’s where Weaver found her. We’d been having some pretty bad forest fires that summer, what with all the dry weather. A bunch of volunteer firefighters down from Georgia had just spent two days out on Eleanore Road, and Weaver was out there to be sure there weren’t any hot spots left, you know. Well, about sunrise, he comes across Miss Dancy Flammarion walking right down the middle of the road, barefoot and dragging along this big ol’ duffel bag, her clothes scorched to rags, like she walked straight through that fire. But there wasn’t a burn, not so much as a blister, Mr. Silvey, anywhere on her. Or the damned duffel bag, for that matter.

“Well, sir, Weaver, he pulls over to see what’s up, you know, and she takes one look at him and starts screaming bloody murder. Crazy shit about monsters and angels and lights in the sky. You name it, man. He finally had to hand-cuff the kid just to get her into the patrol car. And then she bit him,” and the detective points to a spot just below his left temple.

“Took a plug out of the guy’s cheek. Weaver was bleeding like a stuck pig when he brought her into the station.”

“But you guys already knew who she was?”

Toomey leans back against the bench, tugs at his yellow tie and his eyebrows arch like excited caterpillars.

“Oh, yeah. Everyone in town knew about the Flammarions. There aren’t too many bona-fide swamp folks left around these parts. And the Flammarions have been living out there in Shrove Wood since God was in diapers. I understand they gave the Feds a lot of trouble back during Prohibition, shooting at anyone who came near the place, and when alligators went on the endangered species list in the seventies, we almost had a civil war on our hands. Two of the old man’s boys finally wound up in the state pen for poaching gators. Anyway, by the time this happened, this business with the albino girl, they’d all pretty much moved away or died or gone to jail. No one was left out there but the old woman and her daughter, Julia. That was the girl’s mother, you know, Julia Flammarion. She went off to Pensacola at some point and got herself pregnant.”

“So Dancy’s illegitimate?” Deacon asks, and Detective Toomey shakes his head and barks out a dry, thin laugh.

“Kind of adds insult to injury, wouldn’t you say? But we’re getting a little off the subject.”

“Yeah,” Deacon says, and he looks down at his hands, the sweat standing out on his palms. “I guess we probably are. This Officer Weaver, was he the one that drove Dancy back home, the one that found the burned cabin?”

“Oh, hell no. After she bit him, Al Weaver swore he wasn’t getting anywhere
near
that child. Said he’d resign before he ever got within spitting distance of her again. We had a doctor look the girl over, make sure she wasn’t injured, and then Ned Morrison and someone from Child Welfare took her back, and they’re the ones found the cabin and the bodies and all.”

“And then you went out there yourself?”

“Yep, soon as they brought her back. And I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Silvey, this job doesn’t get much worse than having to deal with bodies that have been through a fire. Except maybe the floaters. You know, someone that’s been in the water a good long while. Either way, the stink gets up your nose, into your sinuses, and it stays there for days.”

“Yeah, I know,” Deacon says, almost whispering, those smells too easy to remember, all the stink of death and decay that came along with the things he once did for Vincent Hammond, and Detective Toomey stares at him a moment without saying anything at all. No need to say anything out loud because the questions are all there in his eyes.

“Well, anyhow,” the detective says, and he clears his throat, spits into the grass. “Like I was saying, after they brought the girl back, after Morrison called in the bodies, that’s when this thing landed in
my
lap.” And he stops, takes half a roll of peppermint Life Savers from his shirt pocket and offers one to Deacon before taking a piece of the candy for himself. “No thanks,” Deacon says, and Toomey shrugs, drops the roll back into his pocket and sucks thoughtfully for a moment on his Life Saver.