Bad Moon On The Rise (31 page)

“
Are you fucking kidding
me?” I asked. “I have to stay on this mountain for another night?”
My underwear was starting to fuse to my skin. Another day and I’d
have to peel it off me with pliers like you do when you’re skinning
a catfish.

Ramsey glanced up at the sun. “Depends
on if I can get him alone this afternoon. Maybe after lunch. But
we’ve got a couple hours to kill. We may as well relax and save our
strength.”

“
What strength?” I
complained. “By the way, I’m starving.”

Living off the land is a teensy weensy
bit different when you’re with a man like Ramsey Lee. Within an
hour, he’d constructed a cozy shelter in the corner of some
overhanging rocks, far from the melting snow, with huge sweeping
branches that hid the niche from any human eyes and a giant bough
waiting to cover the top once we’d finished basking in the sun. He
had a small smokeless campfire going and was brewing coffee. I had
hardly finished my first cup when he was back with the body of
something small and skinned skewered on a spit. He put it over the
fire.

“
I can’t believe you
killed Thumper!” I said. “Though just for the record, I’m hungry
enough to eat Bambi.”

He smiled and unscrewed a small bottle
filled with a reddish powder and sprinkled some over the rabbit
carcass.

“
What’s that?”

“
Butt Rub,” he said. “I
put it on everything I eat with legs.”

“
Seriously?”

“
Seriously.”

“
What the hell else do you
have in that backpack of yours?” I asked.

“
Everything you need to
succeed.” He laughed, thinking that was funny.

“
Chocolate?”

He pulled out a Hershey’s bar and
tossed it to me without comment.

Man, but it was so good that the
endorphins sent me into a basking stupor. I woke just long enough
to accept lunch on a stick, which was delicious, and then, warmed
by the sunlight from above, I leaned my head back against a rock
and fell asleep, god knows for how long. All I know is that I woke
with the sting of too much sun on my cheeks and Ramsey shaking my
shoulder.

“
Maybe in the morning,” I
mumbled, swatting him away.

“
Wake up!” he said
sharply. “I’m not one of your ding dong boyfriends. We got
company.”

I opened my eyes and stared up
straight into the face of Tonya Blackburn’s son, Trey.

That was enough to send adrenaline
spiking through every vein in my body. I must have looked a little
panicked because Ramsey put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. 
“Down girl,” he said. “All I’ve told him is that his mother sent us
to find him.”

“
Grandmother, really,” I
stammered.

“
Meemaw?” the boy asked.
His voice had that unexpectedly deep quality of a young man, tinged
with the hint of a higher-pitched crack here and there that
betrayed his anxiousness. “I thought she’d forgotten about
me.”

“
Sit down, kid. We need to
talk.”

I won’t lie: it was hard. Trey knew
his mother had died, but he didn’t know how she had died. The men
in the compound had taken him from the trailer as they were still
talking to Tonya. They had told Trey they were law enforcement, and
that they were taking his mother back to jail for violating parole.
Two of them had questioned Trey in a car outside the trailer while
another two questioned Tonya inside. Trey had never even seen his
mother again. Instead, one of the men had come out with a few of
his things and told him his mother was being taken into custody and
that one of their cars would be taking her back to prison. But they
were going to take him to a camp for boys instead of placing him
into the social services system. They lied further, promising Trey
that they’d find out who his father was and see he got to live with
him eventually. It was only after he’d been in the compound for a
week and had started to feel as if he belonged among the other boys
being groomed, they said, for careers in the military or law
enforcement, that they’d told him that his mother was dead. From an
overdose in prison, they’d said, and Trey had accepted it as the
truth. God knows, he’d seen enough evidence of his mother’s
destructive drug habit in the past.

So it was hard to tell the kid his
mother had actually been murdered, and that the men he was living
with and trusted had done it, and that his grandmother was dying
and on her way out and wanted to see him before she
went.

Trey didn’t say much to any of this.
He just folded his long arms and legs in on himself and sat
cross-legged around the afternoon fire and listened with the
resigned air of someone who has heard way too much disappointing
news in his young lifetime. It broke my heart to see him so far
from childhood already and it broke my heart see how very much like
Burly he looked. He was slender and tan, with dark eyes and angular
features made more prominent by his lack of hair—it had been
completely shaved off, like a boot camp recruit. But he was still a
beautiful boy, one who had been forced to live a not-so-beautiful
life, retrieving his mother from street corners and cleaning up her
puke at an age when other kids were being driven to soccer practice
or chatting with their friends on-line.

I don’t remember what I said exactly
and I sure don’t remember what little Trey said in return. What I
do remember is how grateful I was that Ramsey was there. He didn’t
have any kids of his own; indeed he had few people in his life at
all. But Ramsey was, at heart, a gentle person, and I think he saw
a little of himself in Trey. Most important of all, Ramsey was a
man, and that was what the kid needed, someone as close as possible
to a father. That was the role Ramsey assumed and he played it
well, always saying, at just the right juncture, the things Trey
most needed to hear:

“
Your mother didn’t die of
an overdose. They just made it look that way. She was staying clean
for you when she died.”

“
I don’t think all the men
here were involved, just some. I’m sure the others care about you
very much and would be angry if they knew.”

“
Whatever your mother did,
she did it to try and help you. Casey says your mother saved every
newspaper clipping about you she could find and that she bragged
about you constantly. She was proud of you, Trey.”

“
Whatever these men are
telling you about your mother and the world outside this compound?
I can tell you it’s not true. I know lots of men like these men.
They’re just scared because they see the world is changing and they
don’t want to change with it.”

“
I know what they’re
telling you. They want you to become one of them. But your
grandmother? She’s your blood, and she’s poured every ounce of
energy and money she has into making sure you’re found, and nothing
is more important on this earth than your own blood, I don’t care
what these men are saying.”

Ramsey made it possible for the kid to
survive bad news, and he made it sound like, no matter what
happened, Trey would not be alone. Which was probably why Trey had
not yet bolted down the mountain by the time it came to give him
the one piece of good news I had for him: that we knew who his
father was and that his father wanted to see him.

He was stunned at the news. “My
father?” he asked. “My real father?”

I nodded. “He didn’t even know you
existed,” I explained. “That’s why he never came to see
you.”

“
Why didn’t my mother ever
tell him about me?”

“
I can’t answer that,” I
said. “I think she just assumed he wouldn’t want to know, that he
wouldn’t help out if he did. He’s white and, well, the world was a
lot different back when they were together.”

“
So he’s an asshole?” the
kid asked, sounding more than a little like Ramsey.

“
Your father is a good
man,” I said quickly. “He’s a really, really good man. He hasn’t
had an easy life. He’s in a wheelchair because of an accident and
he always will be, but he’s smart and he’s kind and he’s
handsome—you have his smile—and he takes good care of people. He
likes to take care of people. It makes him feel useful. And he
wants to take care of you. He’s made me promise to bring you back
safely.”

Ramsey was staring at me oddly. I
guess I’d sounded more enthusiastic about Burly than he’d thought
possible. I was not known for singing the praises of my
ex-boyfriends. But in defending Burly to his son, I had stumbled
onto the truth of what had happened between Burly and me. He really
did want to be needed. His new girlfriend needed him. I did not.
The one thing in life Burly could not abide was feeling useless.
What had happened to us wasn’t personal. It just was.

As soon as I realized that, a lot of
feelings I had been carrying around about Burly just sort of
evaporated and drifted up into the thin blue sky above Silver
Mountain, leaving lightness in their place. I felt unbelievably
free.

“
Your father is actually a
bit like my friend Ramsey here,” I said, smiling at him. “They both
like their independence.”

The boy was silent, staring first at
the fire, and then at Ramsey. It had been too much for him to hear
all at once. He was overwhelmed.

Below us, a bell began to
clang.

“
I’ve got to go,” the boy
said.

“
You can’t go,” I told
him. “I want you to come with me.”

He froze, confused. 

“
Not yet, Casey,” Ramsey
said gently. “We need to find out which of these men were there
when… when the boy last saw his mother. And we need to know more
about what’s going on down there before we take him or it could
turn into a bloody mess. We need to be smart about
this.”

“
What are you talking
about?” I asked indignantly. “The kid might tell them that we’re up
here—“

Trey interrupted me before I could go
on. “They killed my mother,” he said furiously. “Do you think I
want to stay with them? I’m not going to say anything. I just want
to go home and see my Meemaw. I want to meet my father.”

 “
Fine. Go back down
there. Just act normal,” I told him, as if marching around with an
AK-47 over your shoulder was normal for someone his age. “We’ll
come for you.”

“
What are you going to
do?” he asked.

I started to tell him what my
intentions were, but Ramsey put his hand on my arm. “We’re not sure
yet,” he interrupted. “It may be we don’t want to get into what
happened to your mom with these men, at least not yet. The
important thing here is to get you home to the people who love you,
like your grandmother. Me and Casey will talk about how that’s best
done. Just get down there before they miss you and don’t say
anything about our being here, not even to your
friends.”

The kid was gone in a flash, hurrying
down the mountain. I wondered if we’d made a mistake letting him
know about us.

“
Think he’ll tell them?” I
asked.

Ramsey shook his head. “I think he’s
too afraid to talk to them at all. And too curious about seeing his
father to screw that possibility up. He might also have known
something was off about his mother’s death, he had to man up early
in life and he’s a smart kid. But I didn’t want him to know our
plans just the same.” He flashed me a grin. “Just in case you
thought I was being too bossy.”

“
No, you’re right,” I
said. “What are we going to do next?”

He told me and I didn’t like it. I
didn’t like it one damn bit.

“
You are so durn
stubborn,” Ramsey said in exasperation. “I am only asking you to
wait until dark. Let me go down first and find out what we’re up
against: how many men are living there and what they’re armed with.
It’s not smart to take the kid without knowing who the hell is
going to be following us.”

“
If you’re so smart, why
haven’t you thought of disabling their vehicles so they can’t
follow us?” I countered.

“
That’s a good one,” he
conceded. “We’ll do that before we take the kid, but we need to
wait until it’s dark and most of them are asleep. The last thing we
want is for someone to discover a slashed tire, or the kid missing,
and sound the alarm. We got one road out of here, whether we stroll
down the middle of it or follow beside it through the woods. They
could easily cut off our escape.”

“
So I basically have to
sit here with my thumb up my ass while you get to do the fun
stuff?” I summarized.

“
Damnit, Casey. Just let
me do what I do best—sneak around. No offense, but you got the
grace of a water buffalo.”

“
And why would that offend
me, pray tell?”

He ignored my sarcasm. “Look, let’s
compromise. If I’m not back in an hour and a half, come after me.
It means something’s gone wrong. Can you keep it in your pants for
that long? Ninety minutes is all I’m asking.”

“
Give me your binoculars
first,” I demanded.

“
What
binoculars?”

“
Oh, don’t give me that.
They’re in that bottomless backpack of yours. Cheater.”