Shot glasses were raised, a toast was made, and a buck-naked man galloped by on a stick horse.
I hovered, dark and low, in the corner seat, cowboy music thumping through my veins, my heartbeat taking up rhythm with the pounding bass. Strobing lights, clinking glasses, the smell of stale beer, bad breath, and chintzy perfume. And the man—one hand clutching yellow plastic straps attached to a crazy, smiling horsey head, the other waving through the air, in time with his thrusting hips . . . Yeehaw! Ride ’em, cowboy. Bucking bronco . . . sex on a stick.
Never seen anything like it. Couldn’t hardly believe I was seeing it now.
The barmaid returned with another half-dozen drinks, which would, in times past, have been the only excuse I needed to stay. Now I eyed the drinks and squirmed, wishing I had an excuse to leave. Maureen (Mo) Black, a distant cousin on Gran’s side, I think—hard to tell when you have as many kin as we do—passed a glass my way and, after a quick clink, clink, downed her drink. I watched her, then set my own glass down, untouched.
“Lighten up, Brynn. It’s a hen party. Have some fun.” To prove the point, she trained heavily lined eyes on the cowboy and waved a wad of dollar bills in the air, thick gloss glistening on the edges of her lips.
Cowboy spied green and rode our way. I sank farther back in my seat, a mere shadow lurking in the corner, as my tablemates clamored to shove dollar bills in his G-string: Nina, Mo, Queenie, Dee Doherty (the bride-to-be), and Meg, too. Mo, the wildest one of the bunch, went for gold: she flashed a fifty and strategically placed it in her cleavage. Cowboy leaned down and, the horseshoe stud in his earlobe catching the light, dove into her breast. Gasps and giggles from the girls, and a few seconds later, he came up for air, with the fifty between his teeth. The ladies let out a whoop, all the encouragement Mo needed. She stood and mounted the stick horse and shimmied in close to Cowboy, her tangerine nails gripping his muscular flanks as she whispered in his ear. He grinned, and off they rode.
I wanted to leave, too, but not on a stick. Just to go home, see my dog, and go to bed. Not that I didn’t want to be with my friends. I did. It’d just be easier if Jack Daniel’s hadn’t been invited to the party.
But I stayed. Mostly out of support for Dee. And as the gals enjoyed their next few rounds, dress sizes, menu choices, and flower colors dominated the table talk.
“Stockings or bare legged?”
“Hair up or down?”
“And that crazy Elva O’Neil had better not show her face at the wedding. Bitch.” Giggle, giggle.
More drinks, a wink, and a sly grin, and the conversation took a different turn.
“Can you believe that Mo Black?” As if we didn’t all know her last name. “Riding off with that cowboy like that. And she’s married. What a slut.” This from sweet Nina Gorman, the blond, doe-eyed backstabber sitting next to Meg.
A tsk-tsk, a lopsided pout and slurred words from Dee. “She’s r-r-ruining my party!”
Sympathetic nods, more drinks and a darting glance . . .
“Haven’t y’all heard?”
“No. What?”
“Her husband can’t anymore?”
“He can’t?”
“No, not since that bad fall. You know, last summer, the roofing job?”
“Really? You mean . . . ?”
“Yeah.”
“Aw . . . no wonder.”
And just like that, sympathies changed. “Poor Mo. And so young to go without . . .”
Nods of agreement all around. Glasses up, a toast to Dee and, what the heck, a toast to Mo and her cowboy, too.
Heads tipped back; liquid disappeared; eyes glazed over.
My eyes glazed over, too, but not from booze; I wasn’t drinking any. Hen parties weren’t my thing anymore. Neither was ladies’ night at the local bar. Which I hated. Not the bar or ladies’ nights, but I hated that I’d lost those fun times. The smoky haze, the clinks of glasses, the screeching of chairs across the scarred wood floor, and the incessant music on some mind-numbing loop . . . I’d loved it all, but the hardest part was the pervasive smell of whiskey mingled with beer and sweet libations. I couldn’t deal with it now. I’d spent a fair amount of time at this very pub, escaping into a bottle, downing a few pills on the side. That was the old me. The new me was sober.
Most of the time.
Another drink came my way. I scanned the bar, stacked three deep with men buying drinks for ladies. They cast hopeful looks our way, wanting to cash in on the cowboy’s spoils. One of the guys raised his glass in my direction. Blue jeans and flannel, well built and a youngish thirty-something, a great prospect by any girl’s standards, just not this girl’s. Not tonight, anyway. I broke eye contact and pushed the drink aside. Girls like us came with a certain stigma, an assumption that we were easy. Truth was, we were not so easy, less than others, really, but that never stopped us from enjoying a few free drinks. We were Travellers; or gypsies, as most called us; Pavees, as we called ourselves; nomads by nature but rooted now in this tiny corner of Appalachia. We’d settled in a place called Bone Gap, a remote and densely wooded holler about ten miles outside McCreary, Tennessee. Mostly we kept to ourselves, choosing to stick to the confines of the clan. But some, like me, straddled both worlds, ours and that of those we called “settled” people. Non-Pavees. Outsiders.
A knobby elbow jutted in front of me. I flinched and scooted over a bit. Regina McGill, Queenie, as we called her, was next to me, nervously working a strand of reddish-blond hair around her finger. Twirl, twirl, twirl . . . Itching for a cig, probably. A nasty habit, she’d be the first to say, and then she’d excuse it by saying something about how even the most fickle were faithful to a few bad habits (one of her favorite sayings), and I’d laugh at that, because there is nothing fickle about Queenie. She’s the most loyal friend a girl could hope to have.
“Not drinking tonight, Brynn?” she asked.
I eyed one of the still-full shot glasses. “Don’t know yet.”
Meg shot me a nasty look. Queenie chuckled, then winced, grabbing her cheek. Bluish-purple marks haloed her left eye. Her carefully applied makeup had faded, along with her inhibitions. Her husband had been beating her again. Mean-ass drunk. ’Course, I was a drunk, too, or so they’ve told me, but never a mean one.
“What set him off this time, Queenie?” I asked.
She lowered her eyes. “You know how he is. Doesn’t take much to upset him. Don’t worry. It’s not that big of a deal. I’m fine.”
I hated what he did to her. She deserved so much better. But it probably wasn’t a big deal to Queenie. Nothing her husband dished out could come close to what she’d endured in her childhood. She kept them covered, but I’d seen the little dark circles tracking up and down the white flesh of her legs. Burn scars. I hated that, too. Poor Queenie. I craned my neck, my own scar stretching and puckering like an accordion. At least my scar, acquired when my third Marine tour ended with a bang, was from the enemy, not the lit end of my mama’s cigarette.
Nina let out a sigh, plucked an olive from her drink—what I wouldn’t do for a single drop of gin from that olive, and I’m not even a martini girl—mouthed it with her pouty lips, and sucked the pimiento from the middle. The guy at the table next to us groaned and shifted in his seat. She didn’t notice. Her focus was elsewhere, her eyes flitting over the items strewn across the tabletop: Queenie’s sunglasses, Mo’s scarf, change from my earlier soda water, an empty shot glass or two . . . Nothing was off-limits. Nina had sticky fingers. Something I’d figured out back in high school, when I saw her pilfer a push-up bra from the back aisle of Logan’s Department Store. I’d kept it from the other gals, then and now. Covered for her, actually. Any one of us would do as much. That’s the thing about Pavees—we take care of our own.
The music changed from country to rock, intermission until the next strip act. I slid my stray bills into my pocket—no need to tempt Nina—and scanned the room for Mo. She was nowhere to be seen. Still off with the cowboy, I guessed.
Dee tossed back yet another drink before pushing back from the table. The bride-to-be abandoned us for the dance floor, where she moved to her own beat, arms outstretched, head bent upward as she spun on her tiptoes, spun and spun until she tripped and fell.
“Poor Dee Dee,” someone said. Queenie or Meg or maybe Nina. I’d lost track of the conversation, all my energy spent on not drinking, my self-control waning. Sobriety was overrated.
I looked around the table. Heads were bent forward; hands cupped over painted mouths.
“Do you know why Dee’s getting so scuttered?”
“No. Why?”
I stifled a moan. More gossip, a staple of any girls’ night. I leaned a bit closer and listened, against my better judgment.
“Because she doesn’t really want to go through with it, you know.”
Heads bobbed in agreement.
“Riley’s no catch, after all, but she’s not getting any younger. Better to marry someone, anyone, than to get put up on the shelf.” That was Traveller speak for old maid. Which in our clan meant any girl who made it into her twenties without being married and spawning a brood of kiddos.
Like me.
All eyes looked my way.
Now might be a good time to leave.
Instead, I traced the rim of one of my lined-up glasses, round and round, and then dipped. In went my finger; out it came again, dripping with gold. Liquid gold. I caste a quick glance in Meg’s direction. She was busy typing on her phone. A social media post probably: Hen party with the girls. #funtimes.
Yeah, right.
One drop. One drop, that’s all. . . . I touched my finger to my tongue, then hungrily wrapped my lips around it and sucked like a starving baby at its mama’s tits. I went back for another dip. . . .
“No you don’t.” Meg snatched the glass, tipped it back, and drained my fun in two quick gulps. “You’ve worked too hard to give up this easily.”
The girls looked my way, then quickly pretended not to have noticed. But Meg was still in my face, glaring, daring, or maybe hoping. I couldn’t tell for sure. But she was right. I’d worked too hard to give up this easily.
I pushed away from the table, made my excuses, and headed for the door.
The next morning’s sun broke hot and angry through the cracks in my pink lace curtains. I slept in my childhood room, in the only home I’ve ever known—my grandmother’s thirty-year-old mobile home. Larger than most of our neighbors’ trailers and campers, and still movable—something that was important in our nomadic culture—yet aesthetically rooted in the late 1980s. Gran never was one for change.
I pulled Wilco close, his muscles rippling against my body, pulsating and twitching, and accompanied by little whimpers. A dream. A good one, I hoped. Like me, my sixty-pound former combat partner, and once the best damn HRD (human remains detection) dog in the entire Middle Eastern conflict, suffered from flashbacks and reoccurring nightmares. Getting blown up by an IED tends to do that to a girl. And her dog.
I sat up and brushed the back of my hand against his dark snout. He was a Belgian Malinois, and so his coat was darker than a German shepherd’s, his face sleeker, and eyes more alert. Though smaller than the shepherds, which were so often used in military and law enforcement work, the Malinois were more aggressive, more energetic, and faster, too. Not fast enough to avoid an IED, however. No one was.
A twitch of a whisker, a slight curl of his lip, and a cock of his ears. His ears, two black triangles, erect and ready, yet useless. The explosion had robbed Wilco of his hearing, and more. So much more. I moved my hand along the ridge of his spine, from neck to withers, then down to the rounded nub of his back leg. It was gone, too. Bone and bloody flesh alike, blown off his body in one searing instant, practically disintegrating midair. Gone forever. I knew the feeling. I ran my hand under my sweat-soaked T-shirt. My breasts, two mounds, but one soft and plump, alive; the other a hard bulge, dead and useless, like my dog’s nubby leg. Wilco and I were alike in that way. We’d both lost part of ourselves out there in the desert.
But we had each other. It had been a struggle to get the Marines to turn him over to me, but maybe that was the one blessing from the injuries we shared: Neither of us was deemed fit for further service. So we were released as a team. Always would be.
My cell rang. It was my boss, Sheriff Frank Pusser.
“You home?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Sober?”
Every damn time I talk to him . . . “It’s six o’clock in the morning. What do you think?”
“I’ve seen you high out of your mind this early in the morning. Have you forgotten?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t. We need you at McCreary Elementary. A piece of a body was found.”
My fingertips fell from my breast to my bare leg. “Which part?”
“Come see for yourself. And bring the dog.”
My throat constricted with anxiety as I drove by a line of cop cars blocking off access to the playground area. Not a kid. Please, God, not a kid. I continued two blocks down and slipped my crappy station wagon between two economy-sized cars and headed the rest of the way on foot, keeping a tight grip on Wilco’s lead. About fifty yards out, the scent hit his nose, his over two hundred olfactory cells kicking into action. He pulled against my hold, tail rigid, ears twitching, his head bobbing as he scooped up scents, anxious to move us toward the decay. Displaying clear signs of his alert, trained into him as his singular task, was something he still did well, even deaf and three legged.
“Good boy, good boy.” I yanked him to a stop, and followed this with a generous belly rub. He’d detected the partial. No surprise about that, as we knew it was there, but he’d still done his job and earned his reward.
Not wanting him too close to the scene, I secured him to a basketball post and headed solo to where Pusser stood with a group of people—some uniformed city cops; a couple of my colleagues, Deputies Parks and Harris; and a few civilians I didn’t recognize. School workers, probably. A perimeter around nearby monkey bars had been cordoned off. A department photographer was already snapping shots, while a group of forensics specialists stood off to the side, ready and waiting. One hell of a turnout for so early in the day.
Pusser spied me and broke from the group. “Come look at this.”
I followed him, my feet crunching into the graveled ground, my eyes already trained on the crudely scrawled words spray-painted on the concrete pad in front of the jungle gym. I turned to Pusser. “Hear no evil?”
He bit down hard on a toothpick between his teeth and motioned for the photographer to move out of the way. He did. And I saw it. A pair of severed ears hanging from a low bar, blood-stained, blue-tinged flesh, strung up to dry like anemic chili peppers.
The sun glinted off an all too familiar earring piercing one of the lobes—a silver horseshoe stud.
So much for good-luck symbols.
Drops of sweat formed above Pusser’s lip. Mid-June, not even 7:00 A.M., and already too damned hot. But that wasn’t why he was sweating.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said. “Back in Nam. A paratrooper, crazy-ass mother shit, went frickin’ nuts, took out a bunch of Cong and cut off their ears. Wore them around his neck like a damn souvenir.”
I raised a brow Pusser’s way. The blue vein on his temple pulsated above his sweat-sheened, pockmarked skin. My boss, early sixties, with an extra twenty pounds plus around the beltline, looked ready to pop an artery.
I understood. I’d seen this type of thing, too. Different era, different war, same perversion. My second tour, a recovery mission, netted Wilco and me an overnighter in a border encampment. I was taking Wilco for a walk when he went nuts, all crazy-like and on scent outside one of the housing compartments. Sarge opened the place, and we found a dozen strings of ears hanging to dry: trophies, souvenirs, zombie parts, whatever. Turned out they were from dead insurgents and were intended to be sold to eager bidders on the black market. Mutilation and desecration turned a pretty penny. A tribunal would have condemned the soldier’s actions as dishonorable and morally repugnant. Well, no shit. Thing was, they deep-sixed the story and kept it out of the press. Rumor had it that the trophy collector, in turn, deep-sixed himself while in custody. Handy. A bit too handy. No need for his commanders to do more than mark down the bastard’s death as another nonhostile casualty and bury the case of defilement, along with dozens of ears.
Haunted warriors and untold truths.
“What are you thinking, Callahan?”
“I recognize these ears.”
Pusser’s head swiveled.
“The earring, anyway. I saw it last night on a stripper.”
His well-chewed toothpick dipped down. He snatched at it.
Harris had meandered over and loomed next to me now, but I kept my focus on Pusser. “A male stripper,” I added. “Dressed in cowboy boots and a hat. Not much else. It’s the same earring, I’m pretty sure. I saw it up close. He left with my friend Mo.” Visions of those ears half sunken in Mo’s bosom gave me shivers. If the perp would cut off a man’s ears, what would he do to. . . ? “I need to go check on her.”
“I need you here.” Pusser got the location of her trailer from me and radioed in for a deputy to head out to her place. They’d get to her place sooner than I could from here, but Mo was my friend. I wanted to be there. Then again, by saying that she’d left with this pair of ears, I’d set her up as a main suspect. And acknowledged her as a friend. Not a good combination for an investigating officer. Pusser wanted to send a unit out there before I got to her. Obviously.
Harris mumbled something about whoring gypsies and strippers. The guy hated me. Hated all Pavees, like many I worked with. But Harris especially hated me. The feeling was mutual.
Pusser turned to him. “What is it you want, Harris?”
“Parks and me, we’re wonderin’ about protocol.”
“Protocol? You do what I say. That’s it.”
Harris sneered. “Yeah, but what about the city cops?”
Off a ways, a dozen or so uniformed officers huddled together, Deputy Nan Parks’s county-issued brown khakis standing out among the group of blue. Short and round bodied, with her arms crossed, she looked like a middle-aged prison matron holding off a riot.
Pusser squinted at them, then back to Harris. “I don’t get what you’re saying. We cooperate with the municipal cops all the time. We’re all in it together.”
“Tell that to Johnson.” He crooked a thumb to point, his lips curling in contempt.
“That’s Lieutenant Johnson to you.”
“Whatever. He’s acting like he’s boss.”
“Tell me, boy. You got a problem with the fact that his uniform’s blue or that his skin’s black?”
Harris picked a piece of lint off his shirt and flicked it off the tip of his finger.
Pusser’s jaw tightened. “Look, Harris. All you need to know is that I’m your boss and you do what I say. Got that?” He mumbled something about stupidity and walked over to talk to the photographer.
Harris narrowed his eyes on the flapping ears. “Serial killer.”
“We don’t know that yet.”
“Come on, Callahan. Hear no evil? You know what’s next, right? See no evil. Speak no—”
“I know how it goes, Harris.” I pivoted away and sucked in a deep breath, inhaling an undercut of onion and bacon on the warm summer breeze. My stomach roiled; I gagged back a wave of empty-stomach nausea. My morning coffee wasn’t cutting it. I needed solid food. The McCreary Diner was just a block away. Meg would be working the morning shift, dishing out a smile with the daily breakfast special: biscuits and gravy, two eggs, juice and coffee. I wondered how bright her smile would be after last night’s late party, considering she had handled her drinks and a couple of mine as well. Yet the diner always offered a homey atmosphere . . . chitter-chatter, newspapers rustling, the smell of burned coffee, farmers spouting the weather forecast, which would be “sunny and hotter than Hades” today.
Hot enough to hang out a pair of ears to dry.
“So, you know the vic?” Harris asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Oh, that’s right. You don’t know him, just his ear. And probably another part of him.”
“I didn’t know him at all, Harris. Not even his name.”
“Yeah, I believe that. I mean, why ask names, right? It only complicates things.” He winked and laughed, an arrogant laugh that made me want to pistol-whip him. Thankfully, Pusser called me over to where he stood with Johnson. He told Harris to stay put.
Johnson gave me a once-over and extended his . . .
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