Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (16 page)

“Do it, brother,” Skeeter urged
him. “Give it up. It’ll be okay.”

Joe Rob saw the squad car coming up
the weedy drive with its rack of emergency lights flashing. A tingle of
excitement ran through his chest and his finger tightened on the trigger. The
sudden urge to start pumping lead into the police car was nearly overpowering,
but he reined himself in, flipped the pistol around and handed it to Chaney.
“Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll play hero.” 

Cornelius Weehunt sank his teeth
into the meat and tore a big chunk off the bone. The meat was tender, juicy. 
The juice dribbled down his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand
and took another bite before he swallowed the first.

“Corny, mind your manners now,”
Aunt Mattie scolded from the head of the long table. Her thick glasses made her
eyes look too big even for her chubby cheeks and sagging jowls. “Slow down and
enjoy your food.”

Kirby Cone grinned over his tea
glass and said, “Where’s the fire?”

Mr. Jones wiped his thin lips,
adjusted his false teeth and said, “Got a hot date, Corny?”

The other boarders at the table
laughed, but Corny didn’t see what was so funny. He wasn’t supposed to talk
with food in his mouth, so he shook his head:
Heck-no-I-don’t-have-a-date-and-you-know-it. He put down his chicken leg and
wiped his greasy fingers on his napkin so his glass of tea wouldn’t slip
through his fingers when he picked it up for a big lemon-tangy gulp.

“Best fried chicken in town, Miz
Weehunt,” said Lois Long. She was the handsome widow who didn’t live at the
boarding house but came every Friday for the fried-chicken supper and
because—according to Aunt Mattie—she had eyes for Rufus Tilley, the book writer
from Atlanta who spent all day tapping on his keyboard and only came out of his
room when it was time to eat. He was a tall, thin man with a bushy salt-and-pepper
moustache and blue eyes that seemed to drink in everything around him. He never
said much, but Corny had the idea that the man knew most everything about
everybody. Corny didn’t like it when the man turned those blue eyes on him. He
was afraid Rufus Tilley might see that he was hiding a secret. It wouldn’t do
to have him find out about Whisperer. Whisperer wouldn’t like that at all.

Forks and knifes clinked and
rattled against china plates, ice cubes tinkled in sweating glasses, men
stifled belches, and the conversation around the long table rose and fell in
volume, sputtered and finally died of boredom. Most of the boarders were
men—retired and widowed—with little to say, and little of what they did say
interested Corny. Usually it was stuff about the weather, politics, or what
they did or used to do for a living. Still, this was Corny’s favorite time of
day. He liked the homey feeling it gave him, sitting at his special place at
the table, breaking bread with people who were almost like family, and being
looked after by Aunt Mattie who
was
family. It all reminded him of the
way things used to be when he was a kid, back in the old days, way before his
fall from the ladder that injured his brain and made everything before the
accident seem like a dream—or like somebody else’s life. Back when he had a
momma and a daddy who bragged about how smart he was every time he brought home
his report card with A’s in every subject. Aunt Mattie said he was still smart,
but that his brain just couldn’t handle his smarts the way it used to. She said
it was sort of like a radio without a good antenna—it couldn’t pick up signals
very well and there was a lot of static. Corny didn’t think it was like that at
all. He was smarter than folks thought, even though parts of his brain were
dead, and now he could pick up signals people with normal brains couldn’t.
He
could hear Whisperer, but nobody else could. And Whisperer was smarter than all
of them. Whisperer knew things nobody else knew and whispered them to Corny.
Whisperer knew he wasn’t a dummy. Whisperer wouldn’t waste time talking to a
dummy.

John Henry Jackson came late to the
supper table, mopping his brow with a handkerchief and apologizing for being
late. He pulled out his chair and sat down next to Lois Long. “Y’all hear about
the trouble out at the old Jenkins place?” he asked. He didn’t wait for an
answer. He said, “There was a big shootout. Fate Porch and his boys are all
dead. Boy fresh out of high school killed ’em. Joe Rob Campbell. Dolly
Chambers’ grandboy, used to be a football hero. Luke Chaney was there too, but
I’m not sure what his part was.”

“Where’d you hear that?” asked
Kirby Cone.

“Barber shop.”

“Good Lord, John Henry,” said Cone.
“You know you can’t believe half of what you hear there.”

“No, it’s true,” insisted John
Henry Jackson. “Buck heard it from Mr. Peters himself.”

“Jake Peters?” Aunt Mattie asked.

“That’s right. There was something
about a kidnapping, but Buck wasn’t sure about the details. Something about the
Partain boy, Skeeter. Had his finger cut off. He’s in the hospital.”

“Good Lord!” Kirby Cone repeated.
“Whole town’s going to hell. First Main Street caves in, and now this?”

“Vinewood used to be such a quiet
little town,” Mr. Jones offered, crossing his knife and fork on the edge of his
plate, as he always did when he was done eating.

“Well, I can’t say I’m sorry to
hear them Porch men are dead,” said Mr. Jackson. “They were sorry white trash,
mean as snakes. I’m sure they had it coming.”

Aunt Mattie put her napkin in her
plate and said, “Wonder what’s going to become of Agnes Porch now? She’s too
old and poorly to live by herself.”

“She’s got relatives in Vidalia,”
said Mr. Jackson. “The way I hear it, she’s no saint either. Some folks say
she’s the meanest one of the bunch, what with all her mumbo-jumbo and spooky
doings.”

The book writer perked up and
actually spoke: “How’s that?”

“Oh, some people believe she’s some
kind of witch,” said Aunt Mattie. “A hoodoo queen or something. I never put
much stock in all that.”

“My Betty, God rest her sweet soul,
went to her one time,” said Mr. Jones. “And the old lady cured her arthritis.
God as my witness.” He put his hand over his heart. “She has the sight, too.
She sees things. She knew things about Betty she couldn’t have known any other
way.”

“Interesting,” said Rufus Tilley
the writer, stroking his mustache the way you’d stroke a pet. Corny wondered
what kind of book the man wrote on every doggone day.

“I wouldn’t want to get on that old
lady’s bad side,” Mr. Jones said. “No sir-ree.”

“Superstitious nonsense,”
proclaimed Mr. Jackson.

Mr. Jones shook his head. “Don’t be
too sure, John Henry. Agnes Porch is an unusual old woman. She lived a long
time in Louisiana, and that’s voodoo country, sure enough.”

Corny could no longer contain
himself. He blurted out the question that had been bubbling in his skull like
water on the boil. “Does she make little dolls and stick pins in ’em?”

Mr. Jones chuckled. “I don’t know,
Cornelius. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“Shame on you, Mr. Jones,” Aunt
Mattie scolded. “Don’t tell him that. He has enough bad dreams already.”

Corny didn’t hear what came after
that. All he could hear was Whisperer’s harsh voice deep inside his head,
getting louder and louder—so loud he was afraid everybody at the table might
hear it. He pushed away from the table, the chair legs scraping the floor with
a noisy
uurk
, jumped up and ran out of the dining room with Whisperer
fairly shouting:
Hoodoo...Hoodoo...Hoodoo...

***

Agnes Porch couldn’t eat. The nurse
told her she had to eat something, and Agnes told her to go away and leave her
alone.

She hated hospitals.

She didn’t trust doctors.

And she wanted to go home.

She used the remote to turn off the
aggravating television, and stared at the ceiling. Without her glasses, the
ceiling was a big, white blur, but that was all right. She didn’t want things
in sharp focus just now. Better to have things blurred and out of focus. Better
not to feel the pain of her loss. They hadn’t told her yet, probably thinking
she was too weak for the truth, but she knew. No egg-sucking doctor or crooked
cop had to tell her that her son and grandsons were dead. She had
seen
it while she was in the ambulance. She had seen their spirits departing their
bodies. She
knew
their souls were not at rest. They were mired in syrupy
darkness, caught fast and bogged down. She didn’t know if she could help them,
but she knew she had to try. She couldn’t do anything as long as she was laid
up in this hospital bed. She had to get herself home. Then she could try to set
things right—as right as they could be. A heavy debt was owed, and she would do
everything within her power to see it paid in full.

She shut her eyes and willed
herself to rest. She would have to be strong for the task ahead. The required
rituals would have to be performed without mistake.

The need for vengeance burned in
her heart like a thousand suns. When the time was right, she would have it.

***

Three rooms down the hospital
corridor from the dim room where Agnes Porch gathered her spiritual forces, Skeeter
Partain was cranking up his motorized bed so he could have a better view of the
TV bolted to the wall just below the ceiling. The stub of his missing finger
was sporting a fat bandage, and the knife wounds in his abdomen and thigh were
covered with rectangular patches of medicated gauze and surgical tape. His blue
and white hospital gown was draped over the bed’s metal side-rails and he was
naked except for his clean boxer shorts. The gown had irritated the raw places
under his arms where the rusty chain had bruised and chafed him, so he had
pulled it off before the nurse started the IV of D5W solution his doctor had
ordered as treatment for dehydration. “You’d be amazed at how much body fluid
you can lose when you’re hung up in a barn loft on a hot day in South Georgia,”
Dr. Sims had told him. But Skeeter wasn’t amazed at all; he’d
been there
,
for shit’s sake, and he knew it had been more than just the heat draining him
of his bodily fluids. He’d been sweating out of fear. The old saying, “Don’t
sweat the small stuff” hadn’t applied today. He’d sweated for his frigging
life.

His mother breezed into the room
with a can of Pepsi from the vending machine. “Here you are, honey,” she said
after she’d popped the top for him. “Don’t drink it too fast.”

“Thanks, Mom,” he said, turning the
cold can up and taking a long pull of cola. He belched, then smiled. “Ahh,
that’s good. You call Dad?”

“Yes. He’s talking to Mookie
Vedders. Your father’s going to make sure Joe Rob has the best lawyer in the
county.”

“That’s Mookie Vedders,” Skeeter
agreed. “Do they think he’ll be charged with...anything?”

“I don’t know. That’s what they’re
discussing now. I don’t see why they would, though. I mean, my God, Joe Rob
saved your life. He’s a brave young man.”

“He’s my blood brother. He did what
blood brothers are supposed to do. I just wish I could have killed those
assholes myself.”

She patted his hand. “I know how
you must feel, but you’re lucky things worked out the way they did. Taking a
human life is...must be something you never get over. A terrible thing to have
to live with.”

“After what they did to me? And
what they were going to
do
to me? They were going to cut off my damn
head, like they did to Mr. Shockley. I sure as hell wouldn’t lose any sleep
over killing
them
.”

“Well, it’s all over now. It’s best
you try not to even think about all this.”

“Mom? Are you sure Joe Rob’s not in
jail? I mean, don’t worry about upsetting me. I just want to know the truth.”

“Your father said he’s still
talking to the county investigator. Mookie Vedders will be there to take care
of him. Mookie’s not going to let them put him in jail. Not that I think they
would even want to. The whole county knows what kind of people the Porches
were. And Joe Rob’s a good boy. From good stock. He’s a hero in my book.”

Skeeter nodded, then took another
swallow of cola. Joe Rob was indeed a hero. But he was something else, too.
Something Skeeter couldn’t yet put a name to, but he’d had a close-up look at
whatever it was, and it had scared the hell out of him. What if that psycho
girl had been right? What if her “dark thing”
had
wanted Joe Rob?

And what if it now had him?

***

Luke poured himself a cup of
hours-old coffee and sat on the edge of Chief Keller’s desk. Keller was bent
over his desk blotter, still struggling with the required paperwork generated
by the multiple shootings, assault and kidnapping. Keller glanced up at Luke,
rolled his eyes and said, “I got to hand it to you, Luke. You played this thing
just right. You had the pleasure of shooting the son of a bitch and I get to do
the damn paperwork.”

“Necessary evil,” said Luke, taking
a sip of the black brew.

“Unnecessary bullshit. Half of it,
at least.”

Luke shrugged. He had already given
his statement to Brian Batty, the acting homicide investigator for the county.
Batty was a competent professional, and he had treated Luke as a brother
lawman, though Luke was officially retired. Keller had explained that Luke had
been acting as an auxiliary officer at his request, due to the temporary
manpower shortage caused by the emergency situation on Main Street. Luke, of
course, had a valid permit for each of his handguns, and he clearly had been
acting in self-defense when he shot and killed Fate Porch, so there was no
doubt that his use of deadly force was justified. Joe Rob Campbell was a
different story. Batty was still grilling the boy in the back room where the
office supplies and assorted junk were stored on metal shelves, and Luke
figured the boy was sweating bullets after more than a full hour in the hot
seat. Batty could be a bear when he wanted to be.

“Okay if I use your phone?” Luke
asked Keller.

“Knock yourself out,” Keller said
with a weary-eyed wink.

Luke thumbed through the city phone
book, found Ree Tyler’s home number and hit the digits. Ree answered after the
third ring. “Hey, this is Luke,” he said softly. “Something’s come up and I
don’t think I’ll be able to make it tonight.”