Poisoned Soil: A Supernatural Thriller Page 17

  What if the sheriff gets to Terry? What if Terry blabs his mouth at a pool hall or something and the sheriff’s men pick up on it, question him and come back to me?

  Blake gripped the steering wheel with both hands, ringing the leather like he was ringing out a chamois cloth.

  Crap! Blake tensed as he realized that he had forgotten what he had done with Jesse’s jacket that he had found over a month before. Holy crap! How could I not know where I put that? THINK! Where is it?

  He couldn’t remember. If they find that, can they link me to Jesse somehow? Is there a way to know that’s Jesse’s jacket? And it had blood on it! Crap! They’ll think I killed him!

  Every thought led to a more sinister thought, like a series of opening doors leading Blake deeper into a snake pit. Maybe I should go look for them? Maybe they’re still alive, Blake thought hopefully, but his optimism faded quickly. It’s been six weeks or so. Ain’t no way them boys are alive in those woods. Ain’t no way.

  Blake tried to think. He lifted his hand and rubbed his right palm on the back of his neck, trying to relieve some tightness, some tension. His fingers found some small bumps, a rash or something on the back of his neck. Blake figured it was a reaction to the stress, so he continued to try and figure a way out of his mess. He cranked the truck and put it in gear, feeling that he was in enough control of his senses, his emotions, to drive home. But his mind kept racing with fears, with ideas...ways out that only led to dead ends.

  I wish I had someone I could talk to, Blake thought. I’m sick and tired of being so alone, of having to figure out everything for myself. But he knew full well he had created this mess. He had made these choices for himself. He would have to figure a way out. How did I even get to this point? Blake shook his head furiously.

  He drove northwest on 441 and tried to find a radio station to free his mind from thoughts that haunted him. A salesman on the classic rock station shouted that he should “come on down!” and buy a Toyota from him. Blake switched instead to the NPR station in Athens at 91.7 and caught the announcer finishing the news at the top of the hour. “Widespread flooding can be expected throughout Puerto Rico as Hurricane Isabel, now at Category 1 strength, races toward the gulf. Forecasters say there’s a slight chance the storm could turn in a more northerly direction and impact the Bahamas. This is NPR news.”

  Classical baroque music blasted through the speakers. Blake reached his arm to turn off the radio as he drove from Athens toward Commerce, the only sounds coming from his inner voice asking him questions, admonishing him and replaying his life for him, as if he were watching a game film on the Monday after a game.

  The reel turned and played his life film on the windshield as he drove. There he was in high school, setting records in his red jersey and leading the Wildcats to their first and only state championship. Then he was in yet another red jersey, but with the same number seven as he led the Georgia Bulldogs toward a BCS bowl bid. And then...the hit. The safety, out of nowhere. He remembered watching it on ESPN while lying in the hospital, the blindside shot that his running back, his friend, his bodyguard, didn’t even attempt to block. Blake collapsed with the hit, twisted like an empty tin can crushed underfoot, face first into the turf. His brightly lit flame snuffed out in that moment. Blake told doctors, fans, and friends that he’d be back, but he knew he wouldn’t. He just tried to hang on to the fame, to the hope for as long as he could. With bad grades and an alcoholic father that had taught him nothing but hate and anger, he knew he was lost without football.

  The reel fast-forwarded and stopped at the car accident, as a driver who had just left a bar crashed into the driver’s side of Blake’s car at an Athens intersection. When the accident was picked up in the Athens Banner Herald, Blake promptly received a call from a lawyer at Peacock and Associates who sympathized and suggested that Blake should be compensated for what had happened to him. “You’re entitled,” the man had claimed. Blake was furious at the world for the turn of bad luck that had come his way. He agreed even though he knew that, maybe...the accident wasn’t the other driver’s fault.

  Blake knew that he had run that red light at night. That’s why the car hit him. But he was furious with anything and everything then, and told the driver it was his fault. By the time the police arrived the two men were in a heated argument, but only one of them had been drinking, and it wasn’t Blake. Police charged the other driver for causing an accident while drinking even though he had only registered a .06 on the Breathalyzer, paving the way for Blake to receive almost a one hundred twenty thousand dollar settlement after the lawyer took his share. It was easy money, something Blake did feel he was entitled to given his misfortune on the gridiron. He liked the taste of making so much money, so quickly. He returned to Clayton on crutches, with a load of money in his pocket, but not with what he really wanted and needed. Fame. Fans. The feeling that he had made it, that he was somebody. That he was important and that he was nothing like his old man.

  Angelica had waited for him as she said she would, but Blake didn’t really believe he would ever go back to Clayton. After the car accident he wanted to get back to her, to “close the deal” on Angelica if he could, to at least have that. She was there for him and she thought he was important. And she was exotic and naturally beautiful, like Pocahontas, he imagined. They married in Clayton and Blake put his money with Angelica’s, spending virtually all the money on the home and a new truck since he knew getting a mortgage would be tough with no job and no prospects. Paying cash for an entire house made him feel successful, important, but once they moved in he had little cash left to spend. For years he laid low and did little other than feel sorry for himself. The pain in his back and legs was too great to exert himself too much, he told others. In truth, the pain subsided after the first year, but Blake had become addicted to the sympathy. He refused to do most “real” jobs like working at lumber stores––not because his body would give out, but because he felt it was beneath him.

  Beneath you? Who do you think you are? Blake felt shame wash over him as he watched the film play on.

  When the winery contacted Blake, it played right into his needs. It massaged his ego, letting him cling to his dwindling local fame by contacting successful people, pressing some flesh and getting back into the game. If not the game of football, then at least the hobnobbing game of knowing celebrity chefs and restaurant owners. After a few weeks of hustling farmers and wineries and delivering to chefs, he made a number of friends and earned, precisely, four hundred and fifty bucks the first month. Three thousand dollars of sales for farmers and wineries that he delivered netted him, at fifteen percent, four hundred fifty bucks.

  That’s bullshit, he remembered thinking. Chump change. Even if I busted my hump and tripled sales, I’d earn about sixteen grand a year. I would have been earning more than that per WEEK in the NFL!

  Congratulations, Blake admonished himself, you’ve made it right to the poverty level. Right where you left off. Dad would be so proud.

  Angelica had told him that they didn’t need much money, that everything was paid for except daily living expenses, but he didn’t hear it. Didn’t want to hear it. Now he realized how right she had been.

  The highlight reel sped forward and stopped in the parking lot of The Federal when Blake made his first delivery to Nick. Getting in to see Nick was easy since Blake had known him at UGA. Only now, looking back on the film, did Blake realize that Nick had manipulated him all along. Nick had brought him into the kitchen when Blake first called on him. Of course he would buy the wines, the fruits and vegetables. Whatever Blake had. “But you want more than that out of life, don’t you Blake?” Nick had asked. “You’re better than that.”

  That was it, Blake remembered. That’s where it began, this winding road that led him to where he now found himself. Nick had sat him down and told him the story of his father in Spain, how he came from generations of men who raised the famed black-legged Iberian hogs and slowly cured them in mountain air
for two years. How it was an honored profession. How the Spaniards, and even the Italians and French had a food culture that was to be revered, unlike the fast food culture in America.

  “Help me bring this here, Blake,” Nick had said as he shaved thin slices of Jamón Ibérico de Bellota ham for Blake, almost spoon feeding the delicacy to him. “Join me and let’s create a real slow-food culture here in Georgia.” Whether he was seduced by the ham or the idea of being a part of Nick’s team, of working hand in hand with Nick to create something really special, Blake couldn’t recall. But he bought in, hook, line, and sinker. He swallowed hard as Nick laid out the plan, the simple steps that Blake had to take to set up.

  “Don’t worry about money,” Nick had told him. “I’ll cover your start-up costs. Won’t cost you a cent. Then, when you get the hams cured in a couple of years, I’ll buy all you produce at seventy dollars per pound.” It seemed to Blake to be an insane amount of money until Nick explained how he sold the delicacy in one-ounce servings at fifteen dollars per ounce. “That’s an affordable luxury for most folks,” Nick had said, “but it works out to $240 per pound!”

  Blake’s eyes grew large hearing that as Nick laid out the basic math of what it would mean for Blake. “Two hams per hog, each ham about fifteen pounds, that’s roughly $2,000 per hog. A hundred hogs equals two hundred grand, two hundred hogs is four hundred grand, and so on. And that doesn’t include what you can do with the rest of the pork from the hogs, which we can use, or even the bones.”

  “What about the bones?” Blake had asked.

  “Well, the people in my country never wasted anything,” Nick said. “They showed respect for the entire animal, so my father would have the bones ground into organic bone meal. He sold it for fertilizer.”

  It seemed too good to be true. It was real money, LOTS of money. And he had the perfect environment right behind his house to conduct his illicit, covert operation. An operation that he increasingly convinced himself was legitimate as time went on. He even convinced himself that he had every right to raise animals and sell them live to Nick, just as Nick had suggested, and to cure them for Nick as a friendly service.

  What an idiot I’ve been! Blake said, furious with himself. It’s just a stupid ham! Gold, diamonds, caviar, and now a stupid ham for people to obsess over and waste money on!

  The movie came to an abrupt end as the filmstrip slapped around one reel, flapping as the reel spun to remind Blake that the movie was over. The highlights of his life were over. And if he didn’t do something to take control, his life was about to be over.

  Chapter 20

  The afternoon sun began to set, its remaining slivers of light filtering through the fiery autumn leaves as they lost their grips and parachuted to the forest floor. A yellow sassafras leaf pirouetted down from high above, tossing and twirling in the slight breeze until it landed gently on Tammy’s face and covered her left eye. Tammy awoke, shook the leaf from her face, and felt beside her. Ozzie wasn’t there. She sat up, looked around, and saw him standing in the bushes twenty feet away. He was looking off, at nothing it seemed, but deep in concentration. Tammy walked toward him.

  Ozzie looked back and gazed at her for a moment, then looked away, continuing his contemplation. His gaze stopped Tammy in her tracks. It wasn’t a spiteful gaze; nor was it a look of love or lust. And it wasn’t the juvenile look she had seen him naïvely cast her way before, the look of wonder and curiosity he had usually worn. No, it was a calm, knowing look, as if he had undergone some sort of metamorphosis. She had slept and Ozzie had been transformed from boy to man, from cub to bear, from pup to alpha male. That she could understand this transformation, sense it from a single, momentary gaze startled her. But there was no question in her mind. She went to sleep more mature, more protective, more in command than Ozzie had been. She awoke with the roles forever reversed.

  Looking back, Ozzie summoned Tammy with his eyes to come as he began walking toward Hal’s. Tammy obeyed and walked just behind Ozzie, but not beside him. There was no hurry in his pace, no trepidation in his step. He was as guarded as he was confident, staring only at the trail before him, yet he sensed everything around him. He relied on all his senses to gather information, to sift through it all and tell him what was important.

  The smell of the campfire lured them in. The sun set quickly and cast a blanket of inky darkness over the forest. The glow of the fire burned so brightly in the darkness that Hal considered wearing his sunglasses. By the time Ozzie and Tammy arrived he was already in full swing, having begun the party once Rex had shown up. “Well, look what the cats drug in,” Hal exclaimed with a yip as Ozzie strolled into the campsite followed by Tammy.

  Hal strummed the guitar, trying to find his voice as if doing vocal warm-ups before a recital. It had been a lazy afternoon for him and he had decided to start drinking early to celebrate the 4th of July, even though it was early October.

  “Got any requests, Ozzie?” Hal asked, smiling at his friend. Ozzie walked past the fire, past Hal to his normal spot on the front porch and stood there. Tammy came up with him quietly, softly. Ozzie bowed his head to Tammy, not out of respect, but as an indication that she should take his spot on the porch. She obliged.

  Hal watched and noticed Ozzie’s peculiar action as he strummed. “Think I’m gonna find me a love song to sing,” Hal said, sensing the mood.

  Tammy lay on the porch and listened to the sounds, but not to Hal’s words. She was happy, which was not unusual for her. But she was also calm and content, where before she had often been restless. That feeling had vanished along with Ozzie’s adolescence, and was replaced with a feeling of belonging to a place and a time. A sense of knowing what she was here for, what she was supposed to do.

  Hal stopped long enough to take a swig and pour a drink into the cup he placed on the porch beside Ozzie. Then he slapped the six strings some more and kicked his private party into high gear, the thumper keg now adding the percussion. Ozzie looked down at the medicine that had nursed him back to health. The liquid that had warmed his body and freed his soul, allowing him to forget his past. To move on. He looked at Tammy and saw the life before him. He knew what she wanted. A simple life with children that, he suspected, would arrive sooner rather than later. He, too, wanted that life, would love living freely with her, maybe even close to Hal, although the daily party train that ran through Hal’s camp was beginning to wear on Ozzie. It wasn’t in Ozzie to forget pain and suffering the way that Hal had worked so hard to forget. The moonshine Hal served up offered an initial comfort to Ozzie, but the following sleep was laced with horrid nightmares from which he couldn’t escape. Visions of his mother, of her suffering, both physical and emotional. Her feelings of hopelessness, capitulation, and despair. Her calls to him, beckoning him and pleading for salvation.

  Stepping off the porch, Ozzie turned left to walk around the cabin. Tammy raised her head and prepared to rise and follow, but Ozzie jerked his head around and shot Tammy a look. Its meaning was clear to her. She sat back down and stayed on the porch, turning one ear to Hal’s music and the other to the rear of the cabin where Ozzie had headed.

  Fifty yards away the cabin silhouetted against the glow of the campfire as Ozzie looked back from Hal’s garden. In that short distance the sound of Hal’s strumming and singing, which was so loud from the porch, was remarkably muffled, having been absorbed by the trees, the forest floor and the darkness. Ozzie listened to the other rhythms of the forest and heard a band of coyotes yelp on the ridge underneath the mountain’s haunting sough. Trees swayed in the breeze and caused distant branches to fall, some crashing with enough force to sound like cannon fire when they snapped. Winds howled in and out of steep ravines and caves, whipping up fallen leaves and incubating screeches that were faded and far away.

  And still, cries rang out from high above that sounded like a mother and her baby were shrieking the excruciating howls of separation, their notes of despair rising up and over the treetops and sending a chill dow
n the spine of every forest creature.

  Ozzie walked past the garden, past where he had dared venture before and continued into the unforgiving darkness, summoned, he felt, by a force he couldn’t resist. He walked upslope toward the ridge in the pattern of a serpentine curve to increase the coverage of his patrol. He stopped and listened to the sounds of man, hearing Hal’s voice and music play steadily but more dully. Everything sounded as it should at the camp. Continuing his ascent toward the coyotes he had heard up the slope, Ozzie detected that they were now silent. But he felt their presence. Close enough to be a threat to Tammy, to Hal. Especially to Rex.

  He reached the ridgeline, only one in the sea of endless, cresting slopes. He stood in the midst of a forest that was as much a familiar sanctuary for wild animals as it was a chilling prison for man. Unaware of Ozzie’s presence, the coyotes had departed, likely scouring the forest floor for a meal from a freshly fallen soldier of nature; a raccoon, possibly, one too weak or weary to carry on. One that had hoped to purchase another sunrise, but found no reserves with which to do so. So it sheltered itself underneath the eave of a moss-covered log for a long slumber, its final prayer to morph into the soil before scavengers discovered and devoured its body, alive. The coyotes walked ahead and away from Ozzie, masquerading as angels intent on answering the fallen soldier’s prayer. Ozzie turned south on the ridge to follow, his pace quickening but not hurried.

  The still of the night was suddenly shattered with a deafening and rapid drumming. A ruffled grouse flushed from a mountain laurel just in front of Ozzie and flew past his face, filling the darkness with the resonant thumping of a military helicopter at low altitude. Ozzie stepped back, momentarily startled, and watched the bird ascend the mountain slope. He continued forward, unwavering. Ahead, a band of three coyotes heard the grouse drumming one hundred yards behind. They stopped, the recently anointed alpha male peering back down the ridgeline in the darkness and sensing a familiar smell. The smell of a creature that should have been the feast of a lifetime for him only six weeks before, another solider that should have fallen but somehow didn’t. The male yipped rapidly and began in Ozzie’s direction, his lieutenants close behind.