Leather Maiden (23 page)

Booger said, “You know what? This photo ain't right.”

I was up and moving. “No, it isn't. I'm going to check something.”

I called Jimmy on my cell. It seemed like an hour before he answered, but he picked up on the third ring.

“Cason,” he said. “What's going on?”

“Not much. You're out of town, right?”

“Oh yeah. Didn't you get my message?”

“Double-checking.”

“We're out at the lake. Outside watching the sun start to dip. Trixie is lying in a lawn chair, looking good in a two-piece, reading a book, and I'm sitting here drinking a big old Pepsi-Cola and can't wait till bedtime so I can show Trixie all my manly tricks. Mom and Dad are in the house. Mom brought today's newspaper. Dad is reading a book.”

“Don't say any more, and don't answer any calls that don't come from my number, and then be sure it's me before you start talking too much.”

Jimmy was silent for a while. I got the idea he was moving to another location, away from Trixie. “Something coming down?”

“I don't think it's anything, really.”

“You're lying to me, Cason. I'm the good liar, not you.”

“It's anything, you'll be the first to know.”

“I don't believe that either. You may not be safe. You ought to join us here.”

“I got a friend with me.”

“A woman?”

“An old war buddy. Nobody you know. I'm safe.”

“I don't know what to say, Cason, except I don't want to come back there. I may never want to come back there.”

“I don't want you to. At least not now. I'll keep you informed. Just wanted to check in.”

“I feel like such a chickenshit.”

“You're fine. Just stay there.”

Jimmy had a few more things to say, but I was hardly listening. I hung up the phone and went to the closet and got the holster that went with the .38 and strapped it on my belt and put the .38 in it and pulled my shirt out and over it.

“Hey, man,” Booger said, “hold your goddamn water till I get my pants on. Me and Mr. Lucky are going with you.”

Mr. Lucky was Booger's .45. It was one of his small circle of friends.

36

The first address was a vacant lot in an area I knew, and behind the lot were some woods, and about two acres on either side of the lot were also woods, and beyond that, on both sides were houses. There was nothing to see that meant anything to me. I parked at the curb and Booger and I sat there and looked around. Night had fallen and the wind had picked up and there was a hint of more rain in the air.

Booger said, “You think you're being fucked with?”

“One way or another,” I said. “Thing is, I wasn't supposed to bring you.”

“It said no police. I'm not the police. Someone sends you a picture of dead women and says meet them in the dark, you ought to have someone friendly with you. This way, you got me and Mr. Lucky.”

I got out of the car and Booger got out on the other side. I said, “I figure they want me to work for it. They said to look for the path.”

“There it is,” Booger said.

He was pointing at a little trail that rolled across the lot and down amongst the clutch of trees at the back. The moonlight made the path look like a twisty, silver ribbon.

“Could be an ambush,” Booger said. “Like I was saying, you don't want to come here with nothing besides that .38 and a hopeful feeling. Tell you what, bro. I'm going to kind of fade off to the side here, and come along on the right, and you go down the path. You got business you don't like, you get to cracking that peashooter, or yelling out, and me and Mr. Lucky will come running and barking and calling your name.”

“Good enough,” I said.

“I hope it is somebody,” Booger said.

“Don't hope too hard. You might shoot someone hasn't got anything to do with anything.”

“Everybody has something to do with something in my book,” Booger said.

“I mean it, Booger.”

Booger looked at me and smiled. That smile told me a lot. It told me he didn't really give a damn about what I had to say, but he would humor me. Up to a point.

The wind was blowing hard when I got on the path and started down it toward the wood line. I looked up to find Booger, but he was already gone. He was in his element. Stalk and destroy.

As I went along, the trail dipped down a hill and into the trees, and I could hear water running. The trees on either side of the trail were wind-whipped, and as they blew they tossed shadows along the trail. As I walked, the trail grew more narrow and the shadows grew longer and thicker. Pretty soon there was nothing but the dark. I had a flashlight in the car, but like an idiot I hadn't thought to bring it. Booger, he could see in the dark like a cat, so he wouldn't be bothered. Me, I wasn't that good.

I went on down and felt my way along with my feet, going slow, and then I heard something, movement in the bushes. I crouched and wondered if it was Booger. I almost called out his name, but held my breath instead. I felt as if at any moment the winged Oz monkeys would appear and grab me and flap me off into the night.

I made sure I had control of my breathing, waited and listened. I didn't hear anything. I stood up and started moving again, and as I went the trail opened and dropped down through the woods. I jumped over a narrow creek and kept walking until the woods split open and there was another clearing. I could see something in the clearing ahead. It was dead center of the clearing and it wasn't moving.

Then something did move. Something came out of the shadows up ahead and went across quick.

A shape. A man most likely, and not Booger. I'd know Booger's tank-broad shape anywhere. This was a leaner, lankier shape that moved like his bones were rubber. The moon had flashed on his shaved skull and I got a glimpse of what looked like a giant spider on the back of his neck—the hand tattoo the kids had told me about.

Stitch, the Geek.

I got the .38 out and eased onward, keeping an eye peeled on where I had seen the shape disappear into the woods. I went to where the shape had gone, moved as quickly as I could down a trail that was half my width. I took a few limb slaps in the face as I went. I heard something ahead of me, a cracking sound, and I went after it, moving pretty quick, and then I didn't hear anything. I stopped. I decided I didn't want to keep going. The brush was thick and it was dark and the shape was definitely in there. He could be anywhere, and all he had to do was be quiet and still and wait on me.

I took a deep breath, backed about twenty feet down the trail, then turned, and there he was. I just got a glimpse of that strange face, that misshapen, shaved skull. Before I could bring the .38 up, he hit me so hard I didn't remember falling to the ground, didn't even feel it at first. I tried to roll over, but he kicked me in the side. I tried to lift the .38, but realized I didn't have it anymore.

I heard Booger yell, and then I heard him crashing down the trail. There was a fleeting glimpse of pants legs, and then one more kick in the ribs, and then Stitch was gone.

I got on my knees and felt around and found the .38. I heard Booger calling again. I got up and staggered back down the trail and out to the larger path. I looked at the thing in the clearing again. I moved on down there, and didn't hear anything again, and didn't see anything, except for that thing in the clearing. As I grew closer, I saw that it was human-shaped and it seemed to be squatting, as if it had paused to take a bathroom break.

I had some idea what it was, but I went over there as quietly as I could, holding my side where Stitch had kicked me. My jaw was starting to ache from the punch.

The moonlight was spilling over the squatting thing. It was a woman and the woman was nude and her skin was leathery-looking, like there had been some kind of preservation attempted, taxidermy perhaps, or maybe she had just been stored in salt. The face was wrinkled and old-looking, but I knew the person wasn't old. I could recognize her even though I realized now her bones were gone and there was nothing but her skin and skull there. The skin was stretched over some kind of frame in the general shape of a human form squatting. The body was nude, and the woman's breasts had been stuffed with something that made them knotty-looking, and the squat was such that her ass was touching the ground; it too appeared to be stuffed with something. The hair on the woman's head was red but there were patches of it missing. She looked worse than she looked in the photos, except now the framework gave her shape. The tattoos on her skin just looked like scars.

There was a dark line on the forehead, and I found myself reaching out to touch it. It was a cut line, and it went all the way across. I got hold of her hair and gently lifted it and the top of the skull came right off, leaving a lower line of hair hanging around the bottom part of the skull. Inside, the skull was hollowed out and there was a fat envelope nestled at the bottom. I took a deep breath and took it out with my other hand, put the top of the skull back in place.

I heard a noise, turned, dropped the envelope, squatted, pointed the .38. It was Booger. He was walking toward me, the .45 down by his side.

He came over and looked at what I had been looking at. “Now there's something you don't see every day,” he said. “You hear me calling, man?”

“Of course.”

Booger wasn't paying attention anymore. He was looking at the squatting shape.

“I know her,” I said. “Tabitha.”

“Read about her in your notes. Saw her in the photo. She was the one supposed to be kidnapped.”

“Guess she was at that,” I said.

“What's that?” Booger said, pointing to the envelope on the ground.

“It was inside her skull,” I said, picking it up.

Booger nodded. “There was someone out here with us, you know that? He got me confused in there. Cut back on his trail and I lost him. Got me going in the wrong direction for a while. I didn't think anyone could do that to me, trick me that easy. Hey, what's wrong with your side?”

“You know that someone out here with us? Me and him met.”

“Shit, man. I'm sorry.”

“Saw him cross the trail, went in after him a little ways, decided it wasn't such a smart idea after he punched and kicked me. If you hadn't yelled, he might have finished me. But what I really think is he doesn't want me dead. Not just yet. That would take the fun out of whatever it is he thinks he's doing. He wanted me to find what I've found. I bet he's got other plans for me. And now you.”

“I see him again, me and him, we'll have a meeting of blood and bone…I guess the game is afoot, huh, bro?”

“Sherlock Holmes,” I said.

“Damn skippy. Read him when I was in the orphanage.”

That was the first I'd heard of the orphanage. Booger was slow to deal out facts about his life.

“We have another address to check,” I said.

         

When we got in the car I opened the envelope. Inside were some religious tracts. About how Darwin wants the world to believe we came from monkeys and isn't that a crime. There were others that looked to have been printed about 1950, and they showed caricatures of blacks as monkey-like; one black man had his arm around a character that I assumed was Darwin. There were pamphlets of a more recent vintage that railed against the mixing of the races. There were also flyers about the speech that Reverend Judence would be making at the university. Outside of it all being hateful and stupid, I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

I handed it all to Booger, then studied the map from the glove box while he looked over the material I had given him. I put the map away and drove us to the next address quickly.

As I drove, I felt more and more uncomfortable. The location was near where Belinda lived, but when I finally turned on the street I needed and away from her place, I began to feel a little better.

We drove down into the black part of town, a very poor section about three blocks from where Belinda lived. There were no streetlights, and the homes nearby were dark. Right at the lip of that section there was a church, a big old white church that was charred on one side from fire and had a sign out front that said
FIRST BAPTIST
. It had a high tower that stood above it all and there was a window in the center of the tower that looked out at the night, and a big white cross at the peak. The fire appeared to have happened some time ago, and though it had smoked the building up good and burned it badly on one side, the other side seemed intact.

I parked at the curb and we walked across the moonlit, windblown grass on the front lawn. The grass had grown up high and was wet from the rain and sprouting some tall sticker burrs that we avoided.

“Man, we're just right out here in the open,” Booger said.

“I know, but I'm not feeling all that sneaky.”

We went to the front door of the church and pushed against it, but it was locked. We went around back and tried the door there, but it was locked too. I knew we could get in on the burned side without a lot of effort, as there were gaps in the wall there, but I wanted to stay out of the soot, which was damp from the recent rain and which would stick to us like ink to blotters. It seemed a funny thing to be concerned about right then, but it was in my thoughts nonetheless.

We found a window we could force up, and crawled inside.

There was a pile of pews. Half the place was charcoal. Across the way, it looked as if the fire had cut the wood in the shape of teeth rising up from the floor. You could see through those gaps and what you could see were a bunch of dark homes and a dark street that looked to have last been paved about the time pigs flew. A good wind and all of it on the burned side could topple like a smoldering fireplace log, and what made me nervous was we were having just such a wind. On the side that wasn't burned, the windows rattled in their frames like maracas, and the air still smelled of charcoal and soot.

“When did this place catch fire?” Booger said.

“I don't know exactly. Dad said it could have been arson.”

I found a little narrow stairway that went up. I hesitated for a moment, but there was nothing else to see anywhere. I took out the .38 and looked back at Booger.

“I'm going up,” I said.

“I'm not stopping you.”

I went up. On the stairs, about halfway to the top, I could see where the skein of a spiderweb had been snapped and someone had gone through. I climbed into the room above. The smell of smoke was strong there. It had gathered into the lumber thick as the paint, even though there was only a slight bit of burn damage on the far right wall. The stench made my nose itch and my eyes water. Underneath it was an even more unpleasant odor.

I was still standing at the top of the landing, blinking through smoke-watered eyes, staring at something by the window, when Booger got there.

Booger looked too, said, “I feel like I'm in a Hardy Boys book.”

I guess they had those in the orphanage as well.

We eased over to the chair that was in front of the window. The underlying stench became less underlying. In the chair was a human shape, but there was little human left of it. A telescope was mounted on a tripod in front of it, pointing out the tower window.

I moved around so I could see the thing in the chair. It was a woman, withered and near mummified like the other; another leather maiden, like the title of the Jerzy Fitzgerald book. The hair was mostly there, and it was long and black as a raven's wing. The upper teeth showed where the flesh had dried and drawn back, and I could tell that beneath the yellowed skin there was some kind of frame, like before, wire or wood. The breasts were stuffed and knotty and misshapen. The legs had nothing in them. They were just skin, dangling like empty stockings over the edge of the chair. It was Ronnie, pretty much as she had appeared in the photograph that had been sent to me. Her head, like Tabitha's, had a cut line.

I took a breath and took hold of her hair and lifted up her skull. There was another envelope inside.

Booger reached in and took it out and I set the skull cap back in place.