Grimoire Diabolique (17 page)

Casparza smiled. Now Janice was packing sealed keys into the corpse’s evacuated body cavity, then stuffed in wads of foam rubber to fill in the gaps and smooth things out. She worked with calm efficiency. Finished, she began to sew up the gaping seam with black autopsy suture.

“You can’t smuggle coke into the states in cadavers,” Hull objected. “Customs inspects all air freight, including coffins, including bodies tagged for transport. Any idiot knows that. The girl said you were muling the stuff.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Hull. My mules walk right past your customs agents.”

Wha—
, Hull thought.
Walk
?

Janice raised her nightgown. Hull’s eyes, in dreadful assessment, roved up her legs, over the patch of pubic hair, and stopped. Across her belly was a long black-stitched seam.

“Janice has been muling for me for quite some time.”

My God
, was about all Hull could think.

Raka began muttering something, heavy incomprehensible words like a chant. The words seemed palpable, they seemed to thicken amid the air as fog. They seemed alive. Then he placed one of the makak about the corpse’s neck.

 
And the corpse sat up and climbed off the gurney.

 
My God, my God, my—

 
Raka led the corpse out.

Casparza held out his fat hands, his face, for the first time, placid in some solemn knowledge. “So you see, amigo, we still have a deal. And you’ll get to be your own mule.”

Aw, Jesus, Jesus—

The scalpel flashed splotchily in Janice’s hand. Hull began to scream as she began to cut.

— | — | —

THE BABY

(UNCUT VERSION)

Rosser kind of joggled on the bus, rocking in his seat. It was a county bus, he presumed, Russell County, one of the poorest, so it made sense that the coach lacked air-conditioning. He felt like he was cooking in his jeans, his soiled Christian Dior shirt adhered to him by sweat, his feet baking in K-Mart sneakers. He’d only lived in Luntville a week, chased here, he guessed, by either penance or bad karma. The heat seemed to be chasing him too. The bus rocked and rocked.

Maybe I’m actually in hell,
he considered.
Hell can’t possibly be any hotter than this.
Nor its population any uglier. The bus driver looked like Lurch. The big guy in overalls in back looked like Shrek, and the woman sitting across could easily have been a female version of Don King.

Everything beyond the window appeared as desolate as his thoughts.
Fall guy, Patsy—call it what you want. I got screwed and I can’t unscrew myself.
Rosser was a project manager for a major construction company—er, had been. Now he was a fleeing felon. Ordinarily he might get a year or two in jail and be out on good behavior after a few months, when illegal cost-cutting lead to deaths. But
this?
It had been Barren and Franks, company’s owners, who’d charged the client for the firewalls they hadn’t really installed. Same with the extra load-bearing beams in the center of the complex. The client paid for it—they had to, via state building codes—but Barren and Franks had “forgotten” to include these items in the actual construction of the site—and pocketed the money. Hence, little more than a week after the day-care center had opened, a roof strut had collapsed, severing a gas line, and the center had exploded like something carpet-bombed. Three dozen toddlers burned up like bacon, not to mention a number of adults. Barren and Franks had greased the right palms, forged the right invoices and deposit receipts, and bribed some “eyewitnesses,” and that was that.

Business degree from Georgetown, minor in architecture. A brand-new Audi, and $150,000-a-year salary. All gone. All up in smoke.
I’m not up Shit’s Creek without a paddle,
he thought.
I’m in the middle of the Shit Sea without a boat.

Rosser beat the warrant-issuing deputy sheriffs by a half hour, went to the company office, cleaned out the safe, and hitchhiked out of town. He kept hitching till he was halfway across the county, then Greyhounded here, here being Luntville, in southern Virginia, which made the little burg in
Green Acres
look like Harvard Yard.
God Almighty,
he’d thought when he first arrived. It was another world, a secret world within the Land of Opportunity. Generations of families who didn’t know what education was. Mind-boggling poverty. Unemployment. Desperation, adultery, and alcoholism as the status quo.

A man sitting next to Rosser grinned at him in a way that seemed knowing. The grin was black. Teeth like pegs of licorice. The guy had greased-stained jeans and a similarly stained gas-station shirt with the nametag COREY. Shoulder-length stringy hair hung down from the grime-edged REMINGTON baseball hat. He just kept grinning, right at Rosser.

Is this the guy from Deliverance?
Rosser flinched, tried not to meet his eyes. Why was the man staring?

“You runnin’?”

“Pardon me?” Rosser asked.

“Never mind.” Corey pronounced “mind” as “mand.” “I was, awhile’s back. Couldn’t hack it no more. Wife got fat, baby whined all night like a bad water pump. One day I’se blinked and thunk
what the fuck did you git yer’self into, you moe-ron?
So I split. Couldn’t stay in Stone Gap. Shee-it, wife’s family lived there—if I’d even started
talkin’
’bout divorce’n shit, her fucked-up kin’d come after me with pitchforks’n shovels.” The rotten grin, somehow, brightened. “The fuckin’ was good, though. At least good enough to knock the pig up.”

Invigorating conversation,
Rosser thought.

The bus banged over a pothole. “Anyways, that’s how I’se landed here.” The grin, more of the grin. “Just like you, I suppose. Am I right?”

“Not altogether,” Rosser admitted. “What makes you think I’m…running?”

A phlegmy chuckle. “Come on. That white button-down shirt? Looks like a business shirt that you’re just wearing ’cos it’s all ya got. Ain’t no businessmen in these parts. Ain’t no business.”

Suddenly Rosser felt foolish in the office shirt, a sore thumb. “You could say I recently elected to relocate…” He didn’t want to talk at all, but the question came unbidden, irresistibly: “How-how long ago was this?”

The grin jolted forward. “Was
what?
”

“How long ago did you leave your wife and child? Er, I mean, how long have you been here, in this area?”

“Six, seven years thereabouts.”

Sounded promising, at least. If this redneck grease monkey started a new life in Luntville, so could Rosser. Who would look for him here? The beard was already growing in, the hair lengthening, dyed dirty blond. The couple hundred grand he’d taken out of the safe could go a long, long time in an economy like this. He’d get some under the table job somewhere, become part of the scenery—and part of a town and population that no one gave a shit about. This was his chance.

And better than Corey’s, right? Rosser had left no wife and child behind, and he had some smarts and an education that would covertly come in handy, so long as he laid low.
Things could be worse,
he realized.

Optimism couldn’t hurt.

“So you’re—what?—a mechanic?” Rosser inquired next.

Corey stunk like a cross between a Jiffy Lube and an armpit. “Shore, down at Hull’s garage next to the general store,” the black grin answered. “I just do my job, get my paycheck, mind my own business. Works out just fine, ya know?”

Just another example of what Rosser needed reinforced. A person
could
start a new life, an
anonymous
life, and leave the past behind. Certainly Rosser hoped he never saw Corey and his rotten grin ever again, but he did appreciate the confidence of his example. The past was the past. Fate had given him a new future, and Rosser was determined to make the best of it.

The shit-hole rooming house he lived in was miles from the nearest store; hence, the bus ride. Store-brand tortilla chips and a can of spaghetti would be dinner. And at the dollar store he’d picked up several cheap t-shirts and pairs of socks. He was serious about this. Thus far it seemed that the landlady approved of him: Mrs. Doberman (that’s right,
Doberman,
and her name suited her). “A fine, fine young man,” she’d commented this morning when he’d left. “So intelligent and polite…and so handsome!” He’d get a radio soon, a TV, gradually accrue the barest necessities. The more he thought about it, the better he felt.

“Check it out, Hoss,” Corey said. At the next stop off State Route 154, a heavyset woman clodded on, grocery bag under one arm, a baby under the other. She turned around, clumsily manipulating herself, as though preparing to sit down required some urgent consideration. Corey further remarked, “Jesus Christ, is it gonna take all fuckin’ day for her to sit her fat ass down?” Eventually, the woman sat down in the bench seat right behind Lurch, and the bus…lurched on.

White Trash Nation,
Rosser mused, eyeing her. Did the woman smile at him?
I hope not. She smiled at Corey,
he convinced himself. The woman was hideous. Broken teeth, crooked nose, frizzed hair the color of dirty dishwater. The baby hung off her left side; he couldn’t really see it save for a pudgy, dirty leg sticking out across the area of space that ordinarily would’ve been called a lap. Wet, glurpy noises could be heard, however: baby sounds. Peeking from the top of the grocery bag were Twinkies, donuts, a six-pack of Keystone.

Rosser wasn’t sure what Corey whispered under his breath, but he thought it was: “I’m so horny I could spit on the floor and hump the spit.”

Her bloodshot eyes darted quickly to him again, then quickly away: a White Trash flirt.
No, no, the glance was to Corey, to Corey.

Corey slapped him on the back. “Looks like this is your lucky day, huh, Hoss? Shit if she ain’t got the hots for ya.”

“Not for me, for you. Either that or she knows you.”

“Oh, I know the look.” An elbow jab. “But do me a favor. Lemme have some sloppy seconds, will ya? Shee-it, bet she’d do us both fer free on account she’s hot for you. Her name’s Maxine, by the way.”

“So you
do
know her,” Rosser said.

“Any horny fella with an extra sawbuck knows her. She’s the bottom of the barrel pussy in Luntville. Just plop the fat bitch down on the floor, spread those legs, spit on that pie, hold yer nose, and stick it in. Hump it hard, hump it fast, and fill her up. A nut’s a nut, ya know? And she don’t make ya use none of that condom shit.” Another comradely slap to the back. “Not a bad lay if ya keep yer eyes closed and don’t breathe.” Corey laughed loud enough to turn several heads, just not Maxine’s.

 
So. The local prostitute,
Rosser assessed. More of the social dynamic, however pitiful. Rosser could not fathom the man desperate enough to have sexual congress with this human beast. Her face looked puffed, shiny in sunburn. Moles like raisins studded the roll of fat around her neck. Indeed, here was definitive white trash. Four-foot-eleven in her flip-flops, and an easy one-seventy on the scale. The enormous breasts looked flattened in the bland sundress, laying atop a distended junk-food belly. Cellulite-runneled legs wide as fifty-pound sacks of rice, with skin the color of, well…rice. Her hair could’ve been a floor mop stained pitch-black. The outlines of lopsided nipples the size of beer coasters ghosted through the top’s shabby fabric.

He still couldn’t see any details of the baby.

“Get a load of the belly on her, huh?” came Corey’s next enlightening observation. “Gotta wonder if she’s knocked up again.
Ya never can tell with some of these girls.” Corey openly rubbed his crotch. “A’course, if she ain’t, I’d be more’n happy ta fuck up her life a little more’n put another white-trash food-stamp bun in her fat cracker oven.”

Rosser wilted.

“Next stop, Crick City crossroads,” the driver announced. “Connection for the Number Three bus.”

Somebody rang the bell and the bus shimmied to a stop. A teenager sitting behind Shrek moved forward for the doors, but Rosser was looking outside at the bus shelter. In the shelter stood at startlingly attractive woman in her mid-twenties. Shimmering blond hair, cut-off jeans and a blazing white halter. Nut-brown tan and legs that never ended. Rosser gulped at the vision, his most spontaneous lust ignited at once.
Please, please,
he pleaded.
Please get on the bus.
Not that he would do anything, make conversation, make a move—nothing like that. Rosser knew well that he’d never stand a chance with such a local. He merely hoped she’d get on the bus so he could look at her, just to see something lovely.

But she made no gesture to get on.

“How’d ya like to park a wad up
that
twat, Hoss?” Corey tittered. “I’d hump her from one end of the floor to the other. Pop the first one in her cut, then jerk off another in her face. Cream the bitch up fierce, huh, Hoss?”

In spite of the appallingly vulgar words, the image was irresistible, and just as Rosser noticed the lusty spark in his penis, his partner said, “Shee-it, practically got me full wood just
lookin’
at that. How ’bout you, Hoss?” A chuckle through the black grin. “Think ya just might be able to git it up fer a piece’a that angel-food-cake pussy?”