BAD TRIP SOUTH Page 5

  #

  FRANK Hawkins settled back in the old wood secretary’s chair behind the desk when the girl began to tell him about the first night the family spent with their abductors. He realized (and thought the girl did too) that Heddy had had sex with Jay Anderson while his daughter was locked in a bathroom.

  It made Frank crawl with the creeps. During their sessions, Jay had admitted to playing around on his wife. Frank tried to gently point out that it was his guilt over extra-marital affairs that helped fuel his anger he eventually took out at home on his family. Jay didn’t buy that. Too painful to accept all responsibility, of course. Much easier to deny culpability.

  Jay never came right out and said he talked female lawbreakers into having sex with him in exchange for tearing up a traffic violation ticket or for reducing charges, but Frank suspected he misused his authority in that manner too. If he had ever admitted it outright of course Frank would have had no alternative but to follow procedure and report it to the sheriff, getting Jay removed or suspended.

  The most liability Jay did admit to was that he frequently cheated on his wife. How and with whom was something he wasn’t ready to discuss.

  Frank remembered a few things Jay had said regarding his sex life. For one thing he had strong fantasies. Now it was Hawkins’ experience that a good fantasy life was nothing to be worried about and in most instances it indicated good mental health, but Jay obsessed on the sexual fantasies to an extreme degree. Most of his waking time was spent thinking about them.

  Jay had said once, “You know what I wish I could get in this country? A basket fuck.”

  “I’m sorry, what’s that again?” Frank had been taking notes, most of it doodling, drawing Popeye with his corncob pipe, and he hadn’t been as attentive as he might have been. Had he heard correctly?

  “You never heard of a basket fuck? I knew a guy, patrolman partner in Charlotte when I worked down here, had been in the Navy. He told me about getting this thing in Japan while on shore leave. How it works is they got the guy down on a pallet, giving him a massage. One girl is sitting naked in a basket with a hole in the bottom. Two girls get the client hard and salved or lotioned up and they position the girl right on top of him. There’s a pulley system holding the basket so all the other two have to do is lift and lower it on the guy. When he’s ready to climax, one of the girls gives the basket a twirl. I think about that all the time. But where are you going to find three girls willing to set it up? This is America, after all.”

  Frank hummed a little to show he was listening, but made no judgmental call on the fantasy. A lot of guys liked an exotic bit of sex now and then, no big deal. But as their sessions wore on, Frank heard other fantasies that were even more unusual than the Japanese basket trick. It seemed that Jay had an active sex drive and an overactive imagination. If he could imagine it, he wanted it.

  Heddy’s appeal had something to do with all that. There had been men who would follow a woman like her across the face of the planet. Maybe Jay had been one of them.

  Frank focused on the little girl and listened as she returned to her story. There was so much missing from the puzzle of the Anderson abduction. Only the kid knew the details. If he was to understand, he had to listen closely.

  #

  AFTER the escape from Leavenworth, planned and executed with the help of seven other inmates, only six of whom, including Crow, actually made it away from the prison before getting nabbed, Crow split from his fellow escapees. He met Heddy where she waited for him in a rusty-paneled, smoke-belching Dodge Dart. The state police were immediately contacted when the breakout occurred and swarms of cops spread out in all four directions trying to capture the cons before the six o’clock news teams got hold of it to take it national.

  They did not succeed. Within ten hours they had only corralled one of the escapees. Crow and the others had scattered into the four winds, free!

  With that many convicts on the lam, Heddy told him his chances of getting away were increased. It had been her idea, months before on a visit to him, that he bring in several others on the plan. They acted as camouflage and sucker bait for one another. The cops were running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to track them all down.

  Heddy said this should give them time to make a quick trip to St. Louis where she’d been living. There was a drug lab there, a big one, a really hot lab. She found this out from the crowd she ran with while he was locked up those four years. A boyfriend of a girlfriend (she claimed, though Crow figured the boyfriend was someone she was screwing) worked there, an amateur chemist, an assistant, if you will. He was the one who mentioned the back room during some unguarded moment. (In the sack with Heddy, no doubt.) It all came gushing out of him like a flash flood, she said. The money. The tables stacked with bills. It seemed that not only were the chemicals on the premises, but in a back room of the house they kept the haul from the sales until it got parceled out and moved out of the house. “You know,” the guy told Heddy, “that two fifty-five gallon drums of common chemicals can make nine billion dollars worth of methadexadrine?”

  “You got a billion dollars in that house? Or nine billion?”

  “Hell, no, they don’t have that much made all at once and it takes time to make the deals to off-load that much crystal--it gets distributed all over the fucking Midwest-- but still, there’s plenty of green in the back. Don’t ever breathe a word of this, though.” He began licking his lips nervously and looking around him as if he thought invisible spies watched and listened. “They find out I told you, they’d take off my balls with a pipe cutter.”

  He sported dreadlocks and a tattoo that crept from his chest up around his collarbone to circle his scrawny neck. Heddy said it might have been a snake. Or a lizard. Or it could even have been a tree root. It was ugly anyway, nothing like the small black spider tattoo of her own that graced the lower portion of one buttock, or the tiny perfect sword tattoo she’d asked to be positioned over her right breast so that the tip pointed to her heart. She didn’t care what the goofy lab man’s tattoo was. She just cared about the information.

  Pretending she didn’t know about his tattoo convinced Crow she’d bedded him. Why go into that kind of song and dance if she hadn’t? Not that he cared. He didn’t care. Was she supposed to swear off sex for four years while he was in the joint? He sure as hell hadn’t, had he? And Heddy was a firecracker. She liked fucking almost as much as whiskey.

  They’d need money like that, like what was on those tables in the back room of the lab, she’d told Crow. They needed it to keep him out, to insure his freedom. Hell, they wouldn’t have had to rob the convenience store on the way if she could have rounded up some cash to take them across state. But she couldn’t hit the lab house alone. No fucking way.

  Heddy wasn’t scared of the lab’s owners after they ripped it off; she just couldn’t pull the job alone. She was no more afraid of the gangs running the lab than she was afraid of the law, she said, and Crow knew she had never been scared of the law. She’d broken it enough on misdemeanor and a few felony charges that it had lost all fear for her. They could only kill her once, that’s what she always said.

  The lab robbery didn’t make the news, of course. Thieves stealing from thieves didn’t interest Mr. and Mrs. Bobby John Smith while they got up supper for their five screaming kids. The deaths were hushed up. Bodies must have been trucked down to the river and dropped in wearing necklaces of concrete blocks during the dead of night.

  Knocking over the lab house had been one chilly business. Without Heddy’s gifted idea of having them lie down on the floor all in a line with their hands positioned above their heads, he never could have been able to shoot six big muscle-bound gorillas fast enough to save his head from being ripped right off his shoulders.

  With them on their bellies, though, and the duct tape Heddy wrapped around their wrists, it was a duck shoot. He simply walked down the line in front of them, put the gun to their heads, and good-bye, lowlife lab goon.
It wasn’t like they didn’t know the risks in the lifestyle they’d chosen.

  He had some of the money in his leather purse he always kept by his side. Heddy had more of it in her purse, the one where she carried her whiskey bottle and a change of clothes. And there was more. They hadn’t even tried to count it, though it was no billion dollars, he knew that much. Eighteen thick rubber-bound stacks of wrinkled, unmarked fifties and hundreds. That’s what they had. At least, that’s what Heddy thought they had. Enough.

  “Where do we go with this?” He’d asked her after they’d left St. Louis and just before they noticed they had a patrol car tailing them--the event that pushed them toward the Long Horn Caverns.

  “Anywhere your little black heart pleases,” she’d said, smiling her crooked smile.

  That’s what he liked about Heddy. She knew him and still loved him enough to break him out. He wasn’t always sure he knew her so well. Like the lab house thing. That was pretty risky, slipping them in the back door, taking the place unaware that way.

  The guy with the tattoo wasn’t there, must not have been his shift. Lucky bastard. His absence saved him from winding up with the other corpses found bound and head-shot in the living room of the house on Prairie Avenue.

  Minutes before they saw the cop tail, Crow leaned over and gave Heddy a long kiss. “We’re rich!” He’d said.

  Heddy brought her hand up to cover her mouth as she smiled. She had told him early on her mouth didn’t work right from an open-handed hit she took from her stepfather when she was thirteen. Crow crooned sweet love noises against that paralyzed side of her lips when she told him and promised to kill any motherfucker ever raised a hand to her again. Kill him deader than dead. Kill him two times.

  That’s why--the money in his bag, his freedom from Leavenworth, and the promise of Heddy’s sweet frozen lips--when she changed her mind about letting the mother and father go, Crow said okay, sure, I don’t care, baby, whatever you say.

  Now he sat in the back seat, Heddy driving at all the right speed limits while they rolled through small Kansas cow towns, and he tried to get to know the woman in the back seat with him. She was really too old for him, hell, she had to be thirty if she was a day, what with a kid ten years old, but if Heddy was going to get some of Jay, he definitely was going to get some of Carrie. She wasn’t fat, like Heddy made out. She was plumpish and he liked that.

  He wondered a lot about her breasts and how big they were when loosened from the bra he could tell she wore beneath her cool white blouse. Her arms looked ripe and firm. Her legs, bare in the tan walking shorts she wore, were heavy, but smooth and creamy like mocha almond coffee you can get in the Stop ‘n Robs.

  “What grade do you teach?” He asked.

  She turned her head from the window, her eyes glazed. “Me?”

  “Yeah you. You’re a schoolteacher, right?”

  “I teach fifth grade.”

  “Where’d you get that bruise on your arm?” He reached over and brushed his fingers lightly across a mark the size of a baby’s fist. It looked over a week old, fading away now, the purple turning the sick yellow of an overripe banana.

  Her eyes darted to the back of Jay’s head and then down to her hands folded tightly in her lap.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” the little girl said.

  “She doesn’t want to talk about the bruise, you mean. Hey, Jay! You go around banging on your ole lady, don’t you? Nice guy like you, I never would have guessed. Big strong cop. Not enough to beat on the guy in the street, is that it? You got to knock your woman around too.”

  Jay turned in the front seat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Like hell you fucking don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Do we have to talk?” Carrie asked, turning again to the window. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You like your daddy?” Crow asked the little girl.

  She nodded her head.

  “Even though he beats up your mom? You really like him, huh?”

  He could see the confusion in the girl’s eyes. “It’s okay. I always liked my folks too, even though they didn’t deserve it. That’s how it is for kids.” He leaned forward and said to Heddy. “Tell them what happened to your mouth.”

  “Let it go, Crow. I don’t wanna talk about it no more than she does.”

  He settled back. “Her dad--her step-dad--punched her. That’s what happened. Messed up the nerves or something in her face. Tell them what you did, Heddy, go on.”

  “I stuck a butter knife through his ribs. When he got out of the hospital he never hit me again.”

  “There,” Crow said. “That’s what you do to guys knock around their women and their kids. You stick ‘em. You fuck ‘em up good with butter knives!” Then he laughed, slapping his knee, until the little girl interrupted him by putting her hand on his arm.

  “Why don’t you get another car?” She asked in a small quiet voice. “There must be lots of other cars you can get.”

  Crow turned to her, but his gaze shifted to Carrie. The woman hovered like a wounded butterfly pressed against the window glass. “Face it, kid. We’re your world for as long as Heddy says we are.”

  She let his arm go, giving up. He looked at Carrie, staring at the bra straps through her white shirt, and wondered why she hadn’t ever taken a knife or a club or a gun to her slaphappy cop husband.

  She wasn’t anything like Heddy. Heddy was great, she was smart, she got him free, but she was a cheap perfume imitation of a name brand, she was bikini underwear from the Wal-Mart, she was ham hocks and beans. Carrie was prize and prime and almost girlish in her innocence.

  Oh yeah, he was gonna have her. Oh yeah.

  #

  CROW wanted to get in a bed with my Mama. I didn’t even have to listen in to his thoughts to know it. You could see it in his face when he looked at her.

  I know about sex. They teach us in school. Men and women get in a bed together and they have parts that fit. The man has a penis and the woman has a vagina. When they’re in love, they stick them together. That’s how babies get made. Sometimes they kiss, too, with their tongues out. I’ve seen it in the movies, but that looks so nasty I can’t stand it. I wouldn’t want nobody’s spit in my mouth.

  But Crow didn’t love my Mama and he wasn’t thinking about kissing. He just wanted to do the sex thing in a bed with her.

  I looked at the back of Heddy’s head and wondered what she’d do if Crow bothered my Mama. She might get jealous and kill them!

  Then I looked at Mama staring out the window and knew she had no idea what was ahead of her if we didn’t get away from Crow and Heddy. She didn’t know she was going to have to do...stuff...with someone she didn’t know, someone who scared her.

  I tried to think what to do. Crow kept his gun and my Daddy’s gun in his purse. If I could ever get my hand in there without him seeing me...

  But he kept it too close. He hugged it like you hug a baby doll. It was a fat purse and it had to have all kinds of stuff in it besides the guns and the tinfoil squares of drugs and the Wrigley’s gum. I’d never get it away from him. He might be skinny, but he was real strong. When he picked me up from the bathroom floor it was like he had picked up a bag of apples. He had all these muscles in his arms from being in prison and working out, he said.

  “Where we going now?” Crow asked of Heddy once he got his fill of staring at Mama.

  “I’m going to head south soon,” she said. “Soon as we make that quick stop at my mom’s.”

  “I wish we didn’t have to make that stop. I’ve been dreaming of Mexico. I really did check out some books teaching Spanish like you said, Heddy, but I didn’t get far with them. About all I picked up from the Chicanos in Leavenworth was frijoles and puta.” He laughed. “Yeah, we be going down into sunshine country.”

  “You’re heading for Mexico. Why can’t you let us go?” Daddy asked. It was the first thing he’d said all morning.

&nb
sp; “Because I like you,” she said, giving him one of her lopsided grins. “Didn’t I prove that last night?”

  “People we know are going to report we haven’t called in. They’ll tell the police we were at the Long Horn Caverns. They’ll put it together and know you’re in our car.”

  “Bullshit. You hear that bullshit, Crow? Is that the biggest bullshit you ever heard or what?”

  “Yeah, I hear the motherfucker. What if he’s right?”

  “He’s making it all up. They didn’t call anyone when they were at the caverns. That was a tourist stop thing, spur of the moment. No one knows they went there.”

  “That right, Cop? You’re trying to fool us? I could hurt you for that.”

  Then something crazy happened. Daddy grabbed the wheel and hauled it hard to his side of the car. Crow was slammed against the car door and me and Mama fell over on him. Heddy was screaming like some kind of cat, real high scary sounds. The car ran off the road and jumped a ditch. We hit a barbed wire fence, knocking it flat. We went bumping and careening before Heddy stomped the brakes and we slid around in the middle of a cow pasture.

  Daddy was out of the car and running hard as he could back toward the highway. It was a two-lane road and there weren’t many cars. One went by now and then, but not right when he was running toward it.

  Crow fumbled open the back door and fell out onto his shoulder yelping. He scrambled up and pulled out his gun. He aimed it and shot at Daddy.

  I was trying to get out of the car too, but Mama held me fast by the back of my shirt. I saw Daddy drop. There was the shot and then he dropped to the ground. I thought he’d been killed.

  “Daddy!”

  Heddy was out of the car by then, taking the keys. Crow and Heddy ran toward Daddy, both of them waving guns and I thought I was going to faint. Everything started getting black around the edges, like the world was squeezing in toward the center where Daddy lay.