I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 Page 28

  “Look, I’ve got four men plus me. You either get a low profile or you don’t, and if you don’t then we should have put out an Amber Alert the minute he broke out.”

  “We can’t afford fallout on this,” Jeffers worried aloud.

  “Then let me do my job. Let all of us do our jobs!” Bishop reassured Jeffers by telling him that Richmond FD was identifying the fire as a ruptured gas line. You disgusting bastard.

  At least three totally innocent people who were alive in Tuckahoe, Virginia, yesterday were dead now. For Jeffers, those people didn’t even register… just as long as there was no blowback on Carlton Jeffers.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  He stopped the first person he saw in Glen Jean, a teenager who laughed as soon as he said, “Mercy, mid-forties, has goats.”

  “Go on up past the Post Office to the next road where if you look over to the right you can see the Godfather’s Pizza. Don’t go that way. Go left and follow the creek on up Scarbro Road, maybe, I don’t know, four or five miles. If you get to the Whipple Company Store then you went too far. You go left there on the County Road, 21, yep, 21. You’re gonna see a big pond over on this side and then past that you kinda wind around a little lake. Keep on going. Just when the road turns sharp this way, look for a driveway that way. Follow that and you can’t go wrong.”

  He took it in slowly, letting the tires creep ahead on the crushed rock driveway; pits and gaps two feet across threatened to punch holes through the rubber. Pretty land, seventy acres in lush meadow with grass three feet high, dense woods, creeks and hillside. She said she was a cheese maker now. She said there was too much work but she loved it, that there was a job for him any time he wanted it.

  Spencer looked again around the grassy field and up the canyon. The stream he had ridden beside ran through steep granite slopes; between them was a tangled amalgam of deciduous trees, some growing, others dead and leaning. Plenty of firewood, but better for squirrels than for any livestock. A wisp of smoke drew his eye to a low-slung single-wide mobile home tucked into the trees.

  Mercy was halfway back, walking from the mailbox toward the mobile home, when he drove up behind her. When she looked up from the flicking through the mail, Mercy looked into the eyes staring back through the open visor, did a double-take, pranced in place excitedly then rushed forward, knocking over the motorcycle to get at him.

  “Jesus, Johnny, you look like shit.”

  Those were the first words out of her mouth the minute she released him from Earth Momma hug. Her mouth and eyes looked the same, bright and joyful. She did a quick trot in place then put her hands on both hips and declared, “It’s about time you showed up!”

  “Thanks, Mercy. Good to see you, too.”

  “XMercy,” she corrected him, showing the giant blue X tattooed where her wedding ring had been, then shaking her head. “Long story. I’ll tell you later. We’re not into having lots of rules, but I’m XMercy. Get used to it. Legal name change and all. You’re staying for dinner.”

  “If it’s ok, I’d like to stay a little longer.”

  “Hell yeah!” Her arm swung around him again, a thick elbow coming through the worn-out sweater as she led him toward the freestanding porch in front of the faded canary-yellow single-wide. “Mi casa es su casa, brother.” She had added some inches, muscle, too, and piercings all along one ear.

  Ahead of them, the metal-sheathed front door swung open when they mounted the first step. It felt staged, like the compact, short-haired woman inside the doorway intended it for dramatic effect. Bare, tattooed arms crossed tightly over her chest, which might have belonged to a young boy. Spencer was going to mention how she looked like Ellen DeGeneres, but decided to keep it to himself. Her lips pursed, her eyes squinting like she thought she was Clint Eastwood. Her body language was as different from XMercy’s as her body.

  XMercy wore her hair long, with gray flecked through the wild black mop, her giant breasts swinging beneath a peasant blouse straight out of the Summer of Love. All that was missing was the beads. Spencer judged that this other woman could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds wet. Her sleeves were torn off, her blue jeans as faded as the metal siding. Well-worn, square-toed shit-kickers with two-inch heels and her stiff upright posture came off like a Chihuahua in a studded collar. It wasn’t like he watched Ellen; the TV was always playing talk shows; bored soldiers passing time and trying to gather in something they could talk about with wives and girlfriends and family, anything other than war.

  Mercy walked straight up, tickled her partner’s flat belly, then wrapped her arms around the young woman and carried her backwards into the trailer. A medley of powerful stenches shocked Spencer’s senses. The sweet, pungent waft of marijuana quickly drew his eyes to a red plastic bong atop the fruit crates in front of a worn sofa. A cat lounged on the unmade bed at the end of the long narrow space, its overdue litter box sitting beneath the four-person, two-legged dining table lagged into the wall. The smoky, herbal scent of green firewood inside the woodstove layered on top of everything else.

  “This here is Johnny Spencer,” XMercy told the woman “He’s family. Johnny, meet Mouse.”

  The woman, Mouse, looked at XMercy like she expected a better introduction. She shifted her glare to Spencer before walking toward the bedroom, about as far away from both of them as she could go.

  *****

  Her annual holiday letters had tended to arrive just before Valentine’s Day, with at least one year in three missed altogether; pages long, an unedited stream-of-consciousness. Mercy was forever enthusiastically moving to the next exciting life plan immediately after her most recent life-changing epiphany turned out to be another siren’s song. She had been that way as far back as he could remember; painting giant imaginary canvases without ever getting around to filling in the details. At fourteen, she had started coming over to the house, telling him how cool he was and how he was going to do something amazing in his life. She just knew it! That was when his mom started on chemo. Mercy took him to his first concert. Just a free show down at the park, but, still, it was after dark. She showed him how to make grilled cheese sandwiches, too, with a hot iron.

  Jack didn’t talk a whole lot so it was good to have Mercy around. Her mom didn’t mind the arrangement. Not then, anyhow, not when his mom was there and Mercy was just helping out. Her mom got mad sometimes, shouting across the between the houses how Mercy ought to be getting paid.

  Her mom had a new boyfriend. She was a piece of work, Mercy’s mom. Her senior year, Mercy showed up with her guitar and her clothes and moved in, just like that. One time the mom came over, drunk, cussing one minute about how it wasn’t right for Jack to be fucking her seventeen-year-old kid and then a minute later getting mad because Jack never looked her way. “What the fuck is wrong with a real woman? Huh?” Then the boyfriend came over. That was when Jack had sorted him out. But Jack never touched Mercy. Spencer was sure of that.

  *****

  Mouse didn’t eat much and talked even less all through dinner. XMercy explained all about living off the grid, about how people can do with so much less, they just don’t know it, and how a chainsaw was a hell of a lot more important than TV. She’d been living there going on three years, one alone and the last two with Mouse. She had changed teams. Nothing against the penis; just had enough of the dicks that go with ’em. She and Robert divorced. They wanted a baby but her fibroids made that impossible so they found a surrogate and artificially inseminated the sweetest little nineteen-year-old. Darling girl. She was taking classes in early childhood education at the CC. Robert sure was apologetic, never meaning for it to happen. He just fell in love.

  “So I traded a wedding ring for a permanent tattoo and I traded in Robert, the one billy goat, for twenty milkers.”

  She set out with a plan to make cheese. Milking goats. Did he have any idea how hard it is to take c
are of twenty goats and make a living out of cheese? It’s fucking hard! You get a milking goat and you’ve had your last day off! She said she was talking too much about herself and wanted to know what the hell he had gotten up to, but then she took another bong hit and went into a story.

  Did he know that goats eat upholstery? “Don’t ever let them in a car, let me tell you!”

  Spencer passed on the weed but took a short glass of moonshine. XMercy said they bartered for it, but she didn’t say what they traded. The corn liquor would have made a good accelerant if the stove ever went cold. It was getting dark; he had already looked around the trailer—the one bed and the hard benches on both sides of the table. Besides the uneven kitchen floor, that was it.

  “Show Johnny the guesthouse, Mouse,” XMercy said.

  After a wordless contest of wills, Mouse jumped up, snatched the flashlight, and flung open the front door. She moved into the tall grass at a trot. “You’d best keep up,” she called over her shoulder. “There’s copperheads sometimes. You don’t want to step on no vipers.”

  Spencer hobbled after the light, his legs shaking across the mushy pasture. Scorpions, spiders, snakes. More than just men can kill. He pushed himself, tripping over a rotten limb and coming up with wet knees and muddy palms. The motorcycle was where he moved it, behind the trailer and out of sight from the driveway, but now he wished that he had found something to use to cover it up.

  “I said ‘keep up,’” she yelled back. “I ain’t got all night.” Not a star in the sky, but he could picture the scowl on her face.

  “Doing my best,” he called to her. “Legs aren’t great.”

  The light was barely visible; she kept moving away while he lost ground. He was used to setting the pace overland; falling behind was something new. He didn’t like it.

  Finally the light stayed in a fixed position and grew brighter as he closed the distance. “There’s matches there, in the jar. Lantern’s full.” She shined the light into a camper shell minus the truck it ought to have sat upon. If anything, it looked older than the single-wide. The light swung over to the outline of a rough shed. “Pit toilet out there.” She flashed the open door. A roll of toilet paper was hanging on a makeshift holder.

  “Thanks.”

  “Uh huh.”

  He waited until the light faded into the grass, unzipped and pissed right there, not trying for the thirty feet to the shed. Except for the dull glow coming off one of the solar-powered LEDs they used inside, there was no moon, no stars. So black he could have been anywhere.

  The makeshift stairs weren’t attached to the camper. He tested them underfoot before committing his weight. At least they were stable. When he put one foot inside, the whole place shifted and he held on tight, expecting it to tumble. It tilted in reverse when he stepped inside with both feet, rocking like an uneven café table. He felt his way to the small sink and past that to the jar holding matches. The oil lamp lit instantly then spit and hissed water wicked out from the damp air before settling into a steady glow.

  In five minutes, the burning wick had warmed up the cramped quarters. There were five layers of sleeping bags on the raised foam mattress, dry, but all smelling of mold. Yet where you are all depends on where you’re coming from, and compared to a solitary prison cell this could easily feel like home. Night birds and small animals moved through the forest outside; he heard an owl, too, after he crawled under the covers. Old food cans, baked beans, Sloppy Joe were stacked on the racks above the bed. Next to the bed were old magazines that he reached up and took down to look over. Classics Illustrated comic books. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the doctor in a dinner jacket and bow tie holding the potion while the green specter of Mr. Hyde looked on. The Count of Monte Cristo. Mutiny on the Bounty. Last of the Mohicans. The Invisible Man.

  Invisible. I wish. But he wasn’t invisible. He was somewhere up a West Virginia holler on a farm that wasn’t a farm with XMercy whom he hadn’t seen in fifteen years and her tattooed dike girlfriend Mouse. Two bum legs and a stolen street bike and forty-six dollars. No idea of where you are, who is coming after you, or what comes next.

  *****

  MSJS, he wrote with his index finger onto the wet windowpane. His breath steamed clouds into the chill morning air. The surroundings felt cozy after a good night’s sleep. Either the camper’s acrid stench had dissipated or he had become used to it. Even the tinnitus seemed milder. The comic lay open on top of the covers. Edmond Dantès should have broken out before they ever got him to Chateau d’If, Spencer thought.

  They underestimated him, or else he would still be trapped inside the gray monotony of that cell. Dantès had had a plan when he escaped. What comes next? Spencer hadn’t planned beyond fighting past the medical room. How could he? Succeeding with the breakout was already too improbable; the variables if he succeeded in getting out were infinite. He could only react. Reaction is not a mission in itself; a course of action built on reaction defines retreat.

  Three raps on the camper door sparked him to jump up, ready to fight. His upper body and lower half responded like two separate beings; the legs never squared under him, leaving Spencer to grip at the window frame on the wall to keep himself from crashing down on the floor.

  “Hope I didn’t interrupt some quality time with Rosy,” XMercy laughed as she swung the door open wide and caught Spencer holding up a pair of his underwear. “Emporio. Ooh. Très chic!”

  Spencer looked down at the waistband then jerked the briefs behind his back.

  XMercy disappeared then came back up with a tray in her hands. “Breakfast. Two eggs over easy, bacon crispy, toast, and coffee. You still take it black?”

  He pulled on yesterday’s shirt, turned his back to the doorway and pulled jeans on. “Thanks, Mer, um XMercy. Thanks a lot.”

  The camper rocked from side to side when she came inside. XMercy put the food tray on the bedcovers and backed out. The camper jolted again, stopped, rocked, and stopped again. Spencer’s coffee splashed side-to-side but stayed in the mug.

  The camper shifted again far more, then settled down, off-kilter but firmly in place.

  “Got a rock under the post now,” she yelled up to him. “Coming in!”

  Mercy danced from one foot to the other, swaying her shoulders to an imaginary beat, then, satisfied, she pushed herself onto the foam mattress, crossed her unshaven legs, flipped her skirt over them and tore off half a piece of toast.

  “So, tell me all about you,” she insisted. “Disappear for what, twelve years, fifteen, and here you are. I heard a few things here and there. Rose would ask after you. Jack still helps her with the house. You remember my Aunt Rose? My great-aunt, really. Seems like she’s been old forever, but she just keeps on going. Jesus! How the hell are you, Johnny? What are you doing in Glen Jean, West Virginia? I thought you were off someplace fighting wars, making the world safe for democracy. But here you are.”

  “The army discharged me. Medical.”

  “I see how you’re on shaky pins. You ok with that? Being discharged? Lots of guys are coming back fucked up. PTSD, depression. Glen Jean doesn’t have three hundred people and there’s been three suicides, vets, right here. Shit, you don’t need to hear about that. I’m sorry.”

  Spencer slowly lifted a stiff piece of bacon, ran it under his nose like a fine cigar, and then touched his tongue against the edge, salty and fat.

  “I could have stayed for physical therapy,” he told her, “but I wanted to be out of there.” He took a small bite, crunched it between his front teeth, and ran the bits around the inside of his mouth. Man. Probably the best thing he’d ever eaten.

  “I can rehab myself better than they can,” he promised. “I’m already doing better. Being outside makes a difference.”

  “Isn’t that the truth,” she agreed. “Why would anybody live in some shitty city apartment, go to work ever
y day to pay for it, and call that living?” She looked him up and down, apprising, and then asked, “You feel up to some productive therapy?”

  “What do you have in mind?” he asked her.

  “I’ve got the cart hitched up, gas in the chainsaw. Take the Polaris up the creek and bring back all the rounds you can buck.”

  “You’ve got a Polaris?”

  “Uh huh. Diesel. Sixteen grand, paid for. Appearances can be deceiving, Johnny Boy. Besides, four months out of twelve you don’t know if that driveway is going to be a river or two feet deep in snow. With that machine, it doesn’t matter. Cuts through water, rides right over snow banks. Sold those damned goats and did something right.

  “I took the divorce money from Robert and went to Paris. Did you know that? Stayed in a three-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel for five weeks, going to the cheese shop down the block every day, drinking wine, kinda figuring I’d burn through the money and probably pull the plug when it ran out. Then one night somebody said Amsterdam and I said ‘What the fuck?’ and stayed on a canal barge for a month. I’d get so wasted and then I craved cheese. I finally saw that the cheese was going to save my life. And it did, too! It got me here anyway. I had to get away from those damned goats, but that’s another story. How does anybody want to have goats? Baaa baaa baaa, always wanting food night and day.”

  *****

  The Polaris and cart were behind the mobile home; he walked around the machine, admiring the sturdy cage, running his fingers over the brush guard and front-mounted winch. A 20-inch orange-sided Husqvarna chainsaw was stashed in the short truck bed. Nice stuff, he thought.