Bad Axe, page 16
The first one she drew out was ancient, its garish cover faded, the pages brittle. The rest were fresher, their photographs as lurid and explicit as the porn Marco brought home from Detroit. Except that these naked bodies were lacerated and bloody, the bare flesh despoiled by gunfire or instruments of torture. Faces slashed, private parts ravaged, jawbones gaping, men, women, children, old and young, all of them dark-skinned, some African, some Asian, some of mixed race, but all brown. The captions were succinct and laced with bitter irony.
“Winked at my little sister. Eyelids removed.”
“Blew a kiss at Mama, no lips no more.”
“Ordered a beer in a local joint. Last order he ever gave.”
Savannah tipped up the mattress and slung it off the springs, exposing a trove of similar rags. Mixed among the death porn were half a dozen pamphlets with construction paper covers and Xeroxed pages.
It only took a minute to scan their contents, one rant echoing the next. The invasion of the mongrel races was a threat to the civilized world. The flood of beasts must be stopped. All god-fearing warriors were called to battle for the white man’s primacy.
She returned the magazines, settled the mattress back in place, tucked the sheet again into its rigid formation.
As she hiked home through the frigid dusk, she tried to talk herself beyond the shame weighing on her. The Whitman family had turned her child into a monster, stolen whatever innocence and virtue he might have had. It was unthinkable that it was in any way Savannah’s fault that Marco was nursing fantasies of mutilation and dismemberment.
Absolutely not. No way in hell.
PART THREE
TWENTY-ONE
I t was a three-hour drive north on I-10 through Tucson and on to downtown Phoenix where Sister Kathleen’s church, St. Mary’s Basilica was located. When they arrived, with still two hours before sun-up, they decided to indulge in breakfast. Sugar found a twenty-four hour McDonald’s a dozen blocks west of the church and Dulce yipped with delight.
While she went inside to wash up and choose their meals, Sugarman spent a few minutes scrolling through Bobby Tennyson’s phone. Thorn waited as long as he could manage then asked if he’d found anything interesting.
Sugar mumbled in the affirmative and kept at it for a while longer.
Finally he said, “Okay, here’s what I see. Lots of calls between Bobby and two numbers in the same area code.”
“What area code?”
“989, which covers a few dozen counties in Michigan. Including Huron, where Bad Axe is.”
“So he was calling Savannah?”
“No, it looks like she started it with that text. The one Bobby showed us. ‘M23’s stolen. Bad things are coming.’”
“And then?”
“After that Bobby called her in early September. Then after the first conversation, Bobby called a different 989 number. He called that one a half dozen times. Long calls, some of them as much as an hour. Then he called back to the first number in 989.”
“So Savannah texts Bobby then Bobby calls the other number which is probably Marco. That’s what Sofia claimed, that Bobby talked to Marco several times. Which means Marco’s still using a number from when he lived in Michigan. Is that weird?”
“Not weird, but not very smart for a terrorist.”
“Maybe he has burners for his criminal work. Just keeps the old number active as a cover.”
“Still not smart.”
Dulce came back to the car with a bag of McMuffins and two large coffees.
“I like McDonald’s,” she said. “It’s so fast.”
“City life is like that,” Thorn said. “Everything’s fast.”
“Do you live in a city?”
“No, we live on an island. The opposite of fast.”
“Are there mountains?”
“No mountains, but a lot of water. The ocean all around.”
After a moment Dulce asked if there were gangs.
“Not that I know of,” Thorn said.
“You are lucky,” she said.
“I know,” said Thorn. “Very lucky.”
“Why are you helping me?”
Thorn fumbled for a moment, then said, “Because we care about you, Dulce.”
“You do not know me, a few days only.”
“We know enough,” Thorn said.
Dulce was silent for a moment, then: “I told my story. I want yours. Both. You can maybe say why you leave your island and come to Arizona. And the years before that. Your story, the work you do, the important things.”
“That’s fair,” Sugar said. “You want to start, Thorn?’
“Go ahead.”
“Okay, so I have two beautiful daughters, twins, Janey and Jackie. I was a policeman for years, then I started my own business, helping others with their problems. Like a private policeman.”
“You have daughters, so you have a wife?”
Sugarman sighed. Yes, he’d once had a wife. A problematic one. No way to sum up Jeannie in a sentence or two. Thorn would have called her a flake, an immature, terminally self-indulgent loon. She and Sugar had married right out of high school, never a good idea, and little by little Sugar realized what a terrible mistake they’d both made, but he’d held on for years out of a sense of duty, and an unshakable love for his twins.
“My wife and I don’t live together anymore,” Sugarman said. “We had problems.”
“Divorcio,” Dulce said.
“Exactly,” Sugar said. “Divorcio.”
“Thorn? What is your story? You have a wife?”
“No wife.”
“I liked Sofia. Maybe marry her?”
“I liked her too. But no, that’s over.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yo también.”
“You have work you do? A policeman too?”
“I don’t have a job. I make fishing lures and sell them. Señuelos de pesca.”
“So you catch fish, eat them for your dinner.”
“On good days, yes.”
Dulce seemed satisfied with that abbreviated history and was eager to get started on her McMuffin .
An hour later they were standing beneath the massive pillars and soaring domes and stained glass of St. Mary’s cathedral, waiting with an elderly nun who’d greeted them as they entered and had sent word to Sister Kathleen that she had visitors.
Thorn wasn’t sure if the architecture was Mission or Colonial or what, but its effect was potent as they stood in reverential silence taking in the grandeur and grace of the sanctuary, inspiring in Thorn, if not exactly a worshipful mood, at least a moderate surge of awe.
Sister Kathleen was young and pretty with green eyes and an easy smile.
She was thrilled to see Dulce, scooping her up and holding her in a long embrace as Thorn gave the sister a sanitized summary of Dulce’s last few days.
“Oh, I saw that on the news,” Sister Kathleen said. “That was you in the truck that exploded? You escaped! God must have been protecting you.”
“But he forgot about my mother,” Dulce said.
Sister Kathleen released Dulce and said something to the girl about God’s mysterious ways. Just the kind of pap that kept Thorn from being a believer. Though he often considered how much easier things might be in dealing with the losses, the deaths of friends and loved ones, the incessant suffering in the world, the hate, the evil, the injustice—to have such an all-purpose rationale that softened every blow, helped to file away the pain into the handy bin of ‘mysterious ways.’
When the sister turned her attention back to Thorn, he explained that there were some dangerous people searching for Dulce, so it was best to keep her presence private. Even from the authorities. Could she manage that?
“Yes, of course. We shelter the undocumented all the time. She can stay in our women’s refuge until I find the right family for her, a happy home with godly people to care for her.”
Sugar jotted down his cell number.
“If you need anything, or just want to talk, call any time, day or night.”
Thorn gave Dulce a questioning look. Was this what she wanted? Was she sure? Dulce nodded and showed him a smile tinged with gratitude and relief.
There were parting hugs and misty eyes, then he and Sugar were back in the Tahoe driving away from Dulce and Sister Kathleen and St. Mary’s Basilica.
While Sugar concentrated on his phone, Thorn headed back to Tucson. Their plan was to return to the airfield where Bobby landed the Cessna. Since Thorn had no official ID, he couldn’t fly commercial, so they either found someone to pilot the Cessna back to South Florida, or hitched a ride on another private plane. Both of which seemed unlikely. Next choice, Sugarman had an old pilot friend back in Minneapolis who might help. But since Sugar wasn’t sure if his friend was still alive or still owned a plane, Thorn was starting to adjust to the idea of taking a Greyhound back to the Keys.
For a few miles, as Thorn guided them through the thickening morning rush, Sugar tapped on his phone and kept tapping.
“You going to tell me what you’re doing?”
“Searching the dark web,” Sugar said. “Looking for posts about Abyss, maybe a website.”
“And the dark web is what?”
“It’s a sewer. A place where everyone’s anonymous and everything’s for sale. Heroin, crack, guns, body parts, child porn, snuff movies, murder-for-hire.”
“Jesus. A place like that, you know your way around?”
“Since I left the sheriff’s department, I’ve had to learn to speak a lot of different languages.”
“You can do that on your phone, surf the dark web?”
“With the right browser.”
“I don’t know what that is either, so I’ll just shut up.”
“Good idea.”
Thorn was quiet for a few more miles, then Sugar said, “Find somewhere to pull over. You need to see this.”
Thorn spotted a strip mall and slipped into a shady space.
“They didn’t try very hard to conceal it,” Sugar said. “Making it easy for their followers to find.”
“Find what?”
Without a word, Sugar tapped the screen and handed him the phone.
The video jiggled and jostled and the sound quality was poor, but the images were graphic and gut-wrenching. The bodies of the eleven migrants were flung about in a grisly tableau. Blood still oozing from wounds, thick white lather foamed out of mouths, splintered bones erupting through flesh. A thirty second pan around the gory interior of the truck and then back again, and finally moving in for a close-up of the Abyss medallion lying atop a layer of straw.
The only sound was the labored breathing of the photographer.
When the video ended in a solid black screen, a woman’s voice spoke with cold precision: “If you want in on this, you know how to connect.”
Thorn handed the phone back to Sugarman and they sat for a while watching the shop clerks arrive for work at the strip mall. A coffee shop, nail salon, insurance agency, sporting goods store.
Thorn was trying to imagine being one of them, a worker, a solid citizen playing by the rules, raising a family, home at night with the kids watching favorite sitcoms, putting money by for retirement or to send the kids to college, following the stations of the cross for ordinary folks. Averting their eyes from the bloody movie scenes. Living a measured, sensible life, insulated from the grisly and the gruesome.
“What’re you thinking, Thorn?”
“I wish we’d never come.”
“But we did come. We’re here and in the middle of this.”
“This isn’t a recruitment video,” Thorn said.
Sugarman rubbed his hands across his eyes as if to scour away the images.
“It’s an ad,” Thorn said, “a fucked-up commercial for nerve gas landmines. They’re peddling these goddamn things.”
“It appears they are,” Sugar said with an undertone of sadness. Seen way too much of this, the shit people were capable of.
“I say we hand this off to Sheffield. This is his world.”
“Sounds about right,” Sugar said. “Can you do that, step away?”
“I’ll call him.”
“I’m going to get a coffee. Want anything?”
Thorn shook his head.
As Sugarman crossed the lot, Thorn took Bobby Tennyson’s phone from the cup holder and instead of calling Frank Sheffield, on impulse he tapped in one of the numbers in Bad Axe, Michigan. A woman answered on the second ring.
“I told you, Ray, goddamn it, stop calling me.”
Her voice had the rusty throatiness of one who had not spoken in days.
“Is this Savannah?”
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Ray’s dead,” Thorn said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“My name is Thorn. I was a friend of Ray’s. Though I knew him only as Bobby Tennyson.
She was silent for several moments.
She cleared her throat and replied in a brusque manner that did not quite mask the quaver in her voice.
“Yeah, yeah, I know who you are,” she said. “Bobby told me about you, how he was trying to get you to help him. You’re the tough guy, the hero with the cape.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“You’re not a hero?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Ray never was much of a judge of character.”
“Ray was shot by a big muscular guy and a tall skinny woman.”
“Marco and Ingrid Whitman,” she said. “Those shit heads.”
“Your son, Marco?”
“Yeah, isn’t that perfect? Killed his own father. I warned him and warned him but Ray didn’t believe what a monster the boy became. He thought he could reason with him. Thought he could trick him into believing Ray had converted to Marco’s fucked up religion, pretend he’d become a true believer, just to get close to the boy, save his soul from that Abyss bullshit.”
“It may have been an accident,” Thorn said. “A stray shot. Marco and the woman were spraying lots of rounds, I got winged, Ray was gut-shot. I don’t think Marco or Ingrid even knew who they were shooting at.”
Savannah breathed into the receiver, slow, steady and deep.
“What do you want? Why’re you calling me? Just to tell me a man I haven’t seen for decades is dead. You looking for a reaction, want to hear me cry, what?”
“I’m not sure why I called. Maybe I just wanted to make sure you were real, hear your voice.”
“Well, now you heard it.”
She cut the connection.
After Savannah ended the call with Thorn, she stared at the phone, then drew back her hand and flung it across the kitchen. It bounced off the refrigerator door and tumbled onto the rug. Not broken, not even its glass face. She set it on the counter and went to find Judson to tell him what she’d learned of Ray and Marco and talk it through.
She hollered for him and got no reply. She went upstairs, and found no sign of him there. Vegas was off somewhere in her car, so maybe he’d gone off with her on her errands. She went outside, called his name some more.
At the open doorway of the shed she stood for several moments blinking, and struggling to comprehend what she was seeing, then struggling just to breathe, staring at his body, at the noose taut at his neck, at the clothes he’d chosen for his big finale. Faded jeans, a clean white T-shirt, old running shoes, his favorite wardrobe.
He could have managed it other ways and lots of other places. He had guns which would’ve been easier, quicker, more dependable. Maybe even less painful. Walk out in a back field and be done. But she realized that Judson had wanted this act to have meaning. To send a message. So he’d chosen the shed where the landmines were stored and where they languished all those years.
Even the rope he used was significant. It was one of the dock lines that for years was coiled and stored in the cabin of the Flying Dragon. The shed and the vessel were both linked to the aborted fantasies of their youth. And of course the Flying Dragon was where Marty botched his own hanging, forcing Savannah to finish it.
Savannah cut his body down. No need to finish Judson’s job. He even left her a step ladder and a box-cutter nearby. Typical of his attention to detail, a workmanlike exercise in death. A skilled electrician and carpenter whose last task was perfectly carried out, from the neatly tied hangman’s knot he’d fashioned, to the half hitch he’d fixed to the rafter. All measured and exact. He’d even factored in the stretch in the rope and the height of the oak barrel he’d climbed atop. His shoes missed the wood floor by inches.
It was no surprise he was grieving Nola’s death. The whole family was. Vegas was mute and inconsolable, and Savannah was paralyzed, could barely perform her daily functions. Hardly eating, sitting long hours in the recliner staring at the blank screen of the TV. But Judson hid his pain. That was his way.
He’d always been the impassive one. Grew up as an Army brat, the only child of a master sergeant who for years made Judson endure silently the beatings he administered with a length of garden hose, thrashings done with such expertise they left no marks other than the invisible scars Judson lived with ever after.
The grown-up Judson was stoic and even-tempered, but his placid exterior was a lie. So thoroughly had he mastered his emotions that Savannah often forgot how the horrors of his childhood still churned below the surface.
Still, Judson was a decent father to Vegas, offering sound advice and support, never raising a hand to her despite her face-spitting contempt, her screaming tantrums, her years of slutty outrages and the string of derelicts and scum she brought home to her bed. Boys and men she had no interest in except to infuriate Savannah and Judson.
Unruffled in the face of every hardship the family endured, poverty, sickness, loss and disappointment, the bitterly cruel winters, Judson was the family’s rock. Even Marco’s years of brutish misconduct never roused Judson’s ire. It sometimes seemed Judson was floating a thousand feet above his own existence.
But Nola changed him. From the moment he saw her in the hospital bassinet Judson was defenseless. Her happy smile, her raucous giggles stripped away his armor. Stirred sensations he never permitted himself before. Not even Savannah penetrated as deep inside Judson’s heart as that child.
