Leather Maiden Read online

  We made our way up the hill. The wind picked up, and now there was dampness with it. Not full-blown rain, but a soft lick of moisture. We found our pup tent and pulled some things from the motorcycles inside and let down the mosquito netting again, though now we didn’t need it. The mosquitoes and flies had fled before the oncoming rain. We unrolled our sleeping bags inside the tent.

  From the vantage point we had made for ourselves on the hill, we could see lights in the town, and in the wet mist that was soon to be a full blowing rain, the lights seemed greasy, as if wiped over with Vaseline; they seemed farther away than they really were, as if they had taken the place of the stars and had become a galaxy of their own.

  We took off our gloves, our socks and shoes.

  Jimmy said, “I think we screwed up, bro. I don’t like letting them go.”

  “What were we going to do with them? Keep them as pets?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t like it.”

  “We got them by the balls now.”

  “Just because we got some DVDs, the hard drive, doesn’t mean they don’t have others of me and Caroline. And besides, the Tabitha kid. She doesn’t have balls.”

  “We in the intellectual trade call that speaking metaphorically.”

  “Is that what you call it? I call it bullshit. Cops come, find us with all this stuff, how’s that gonna look?”

  I had to admit, I hadn’t thought about that.

  “Jesus,” Jimmy said. “I can’t believe Caroline was like that. I thought we had something special.”

  “So did Trixie.”

  “Don’t go there.”

  “Caroline may have been a bigger shit than you, Jimmy, but you don’t come out of this shiny as a newly minted dime either.”

  “Still, don’t drop it on me.”

  “You brought us to this place the minute you started lying and fucking around.”

  I stretched out on my sleeping bag and watched the rain, which was now coming down hard with a sound like someone standing above us flinging down ball bearings.

  Jimmy shifted so that he was on his stomach with his hands holding up his chin, looking out the front of the tent.

  “I hate this rain,” he said. “It always depresses me.”

  “After all the dry I saw and lived with, all the dust I had to eat, anytime it rains I’m a happy man. I love the rain. I love to watch it, smell it, feel it.”

  “You believe what those two said, Cason? About Caroline? About what they did, how they came by the DVDs?”

  “They probably prettied themselves up a little, but yeah, I think they’re shooting straight for the most part.”

  “You don’t think they killed Caroline, do you?”

  “They’re dopes, but they aren’t killers.”

  Jimmy repositioned himself, turned his head toward me.

  “You’ve found out a lot of stuff about me, Cason. I hate you had to.”

  “It’s how it is.”

  “I want you to know I didn’t do anything on purpose to hurt you.”

  “I know that. You think I don’t know that? Come on, let’s get some sleep.”

  I reached around the netting and pulled the zipper to the tent until it closed, and then I crawled inside the sleeping bag. For a little while I thought about Gabby, and then I thought of Iraq and all the sand and all the heat and all the emptiness I felt; the emptiness was for me a feeling like tumbling from an airplane without a chute. Finally I just closed my eyes and thought about a nice comfortable place in the woods and me all dry and at ease, listening to the rain, feeling the cool wind blow.

  23

  It was still dark when we broke camp. We had slept for a while, but during the night the comfort I had felt went away and the rain pounded against the tent so loud I couldn’t sleep. And then, just as quickly, the rain was gone and the night was clear again and the lights were no longer greasy.

  We got up and shook the tent off and rolled it up, Jimmy saying he would spread it out to dry when he got home. I took the shells out of the gun Jimmy had taken from the kids, and wiped them with a handkerchief and wiped the gun down and held it with the handkerchief, keeping my fingers off of it. I walked down to the kudzu, looked around and, when I felt no one was looking, tossed the gun and the shells into the greenery and went back up the hill to join Jimmy.

  We packed up, me with the DVDs in the pack on my back, the rest of the stuff, including the hard drive, wrapped up in my sleeping bag, strapped across the back of the bike. We mounted up and pulled on helmets and kicked the bikes to life and rode down the slick hill without the tires sliding out from under us, went through the gravel spot behind the house and on out to the road that wound down to the highway below.

  The rain had busted up the heat. Riding into town the air was cool and pleasant. When we got to Main we forked. Jimmy went left and I went right. I rode over to my place and parked the bike in front of the door. I unlocked the door and took the pack inside and dropped it on my couch. I got the sleeping bag with the hard drive in it and the rest of my goods, and shoved the bike inside the apartment and left it, muddy tires and all, just to the left of the door. I didn’t know what else to do with it. I left it outside, it might be stolen. I got a towel and wiped the bike down, but didn’t bother with the tires or the muddy mess it made on the floor.

  I opened up the pack and prowled through the DVDs. They had numbers on them. The numbers didn’t mean anything to me. I put the DVDs in the player, one after another, watching just enough to see if I recognized any faces. I did. Nearly all of them surprised me. One of them was the high school principal. One of them was the balding guy I had seen in the history department, the one who had told me where Jimmy’s office was.

  Caroline may have been smart as a whip in history, but her real gift was the con, and possibly commerce. And then, something had gone wrong, and the wrong of it seemed to be simply this: she had blackmailed the wrong person and they got their DVD back and put her down like a lab rat.

  A suspect came to mind. Reverend Dinkins. Caroline might have decided he was the one to go after. He had a lot of money, and he had the most to lose. Showing his ass on a video, bucking with Caroline, wouldn’t have been good for business. He could have killed her and taken his DVD, all the DVDs, stashed them in the church and destroyed just the one, his. But what would be the point in that? Destroying his, but stuffing the rest upstairs in the church. That was risky. ’Course, a guy like Dinkins, he could have been risky, and that’s why he did what he did in the first place, messing with Caroline. And he could have had blackmail plans of his own.

  I turned on my computer, got on the Internet and looked Dinkins up. It said all the things I already knew. It had pictures of him. He was a handsome guy who looked like he ought to be on the football team, or maybe the wrestling team. He had that kind of build, strong-looking, and he had a fierce look out of his eye.

  For the hell of it, I looked up Judence. I knew a lot about him already, as he was worldwide famous, not just Camp Rapture famous. He didn’t look all that different than he had always looked. A little grayer at the temples, but he still looked like the guy who had gone hand to hand with three racists thirty years ago and beaten all three, putting two of them in the hospital. It was a legendary event, and it might even have been true.

  I looked at his eyes. His and Dinkins’s, different colors, but they had the same sort of intensity. I wondered if either of them really believed in anything.

  I turned off the computer and thought some more about Dinkins as Caroline’s murderer. It was a theory, but I didn’t like it a lot. I kept coming back to Stitch, the Geek. That fit better. It made more sense that something had gone wrong and he had lost it, and just did her in, tossed her out somewhere. But if so, he sounded like the kind of guy who would have taken over the blackmail business. Why hadn’t he started blackmailing folks, and how and why had the DVDs ended up in the church?

  And maybe the kids were lying to me. Maybe they weren’t just a couple o
f stupids, but were a couple of stupid murderers.

  I liked that theory least of all.

  I put all the DVDs away in the backpack, went to my bedroom and got the footstool there, arranged it in the closet so that it was below the little trapdoor in the ceiling. I stood on the stool and moved the trap back and stuck the pack up there and got the hard drive and boosted it up there too. I slid the trap back in place and put the stool away. It wasn’t exactly the world’s best hiding place, but then again, as far as I knew, no one was looking for me to have a stash of DVDs and a hard drive with Caroline Allison screwing half the town.

  I got a spare pair of old tennis shoes out of the closet, and some old socks. I got some gloves and a ski mask. I put on the tennis shoes and a windbreaker and fitted the gloves, tied my good shoes together with their shoestrings and threw them over my shoulder, stuck the socks in my pocket. I was carrying a lot, but at least it wasn’t the battle rattle I had carried in Iraq. Compared to that gear, I was near naked.

  I pushed the motorcycle back outside. When I locked up the apartment, I put on the ski mask for the wind, which had grown pretty chilly, then pulled on the helmet and looked at the sky. It was still dark, but the stars were less obvious, and a glance at my watch told me it wouldn’t be dark long. Another two hours at the most.

  I slung the good shoes over the back of the bike and rode over to the place where Ernie said they parked their car when they slipped into the church. I found a place down by the creek where I could push the motorcycle behind some brush, got the flashlight out of one of the saddlebags, threw the tied shoes over one shoulder and left the bike there. I walked down the narrow trail along the creek until I was under the big bridge that went over the highway. A wild run of water was pouring out of a huge culvert and emptying into the creek that ran beneath the bridge. The creek was churning along with a lionish roar. The rain had filled the creek and it was high, and when I flashed the light on it, the water was the color of dirty mustard. It was a lucky thing the creek bed was cut deep, or it would have been all over the park, maybe up in places that wouldn’t have done some of the nearby buildings any good.

  I remembered that Ernie or Tabitha, one of them, said when the water was running it was a rough place to be. The culvert was easily six feet high. I went to the mouth of it, saw that it was rusted badly around the edges, and when I looked inside it was dark, like the barrel of a gun. I poked the flashlight around inside, and the light didn’t go far. Water rushed out and over my feet and I could already feel it seeping through my shoes and into my socks. The water was cold.

  I stepped inside the culvert, stooping a bit, and began to move along. There was all manner of debris, and it stunk like a sewer pipe, and something sticky dripped off the sides and made me keep my hands close.

  I kicked a plastic bottle of some kind out of my way, and then I saw something move in the water, and just a touch of the light let me know what it was. A snake. And not just any snake. A water moccasin. For a moment I froze. The snake didn’t. He swam lethargically between my legs.

  I turned and put the light on him and watched him move through the dark water, and then I couldn’t see him anymore. I took a deep breath and was glad I didn’t have to clean shit out of my pants. This time of year, it was almost too late for snakes. But almost, as they say, only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

  I kept going. I finally came up against a barrier. The culvert ended. For a moment I was baffled, but then I saw a faint light to my right and realized the culvert turned slightly. It didn’t go far before there was an opening and I could see out. There was a slight hill above it, and I could see the culvert had been designed to catch water running off the hill and to divert it into the creek.

  When I was out of the culvert, I sucked in some fresher air and moved along the side of the bank. There was a little clay-and-gravel trail. I went up that and saw the back of the church was only a hundred feet away. So far, what Ernie and Tabitha had said checked out.

  The light from the lot and from the back door of the church was strong enough to make a blind man put on shades. I moved quickly to the back steps of the church. I sat down on the bottom step and did what Ernie said they did. I took off my wet and muddy shoes, put on the socks and good shoes. That way I wouldn’t leave any mud or any footprints. Maybe the chief of police was the kind of guy who could track a popcorn fart through a windstorm, but I doubted his sleuthing ability.

  When I had the shoes on I put my other pair at the bottom of the stairs, stuck my wet socks down in them, set the shoes off to the side of the concrete banister. I went up the steps, put my little flashlight in my teeth, got a credit card out of my wallet, stuck it in the crack between door and lock and moved it around. Nothing happened at first. I was beginning to think the lock wasn’t so easy, then it clicked a little and I felt the doorknob move slightly. I picked up on the knob, and when I did the thing moved again, and then it gave out with a soft snick and the door was open.

  Slipping inside, I used the light to examine the door. It was a simple rig, and all I had to do for now was close it and flick the lock, then set the lock again and pull it shut when I went out. It would lock up fine until someone showed up with a key or a credit card. The gloves I was wearing would spare the fingerprints.

  It was well air-conditioned inside, and that would be fine in a few hours, but right now it made me cold. Still, I pushed the ski mask up so that it was nothing but a hat on my head, flashed the light around. There were stained glass windows and there was faint illumination coming through from the outside lights. Dust floated up into the light and twisted about and the air was thick with it and it made me sneeze. It wasn’t something you would see in common light, but the flashlight, there in the dark, picked it up like a particle beam detector.

  I moved around until I discovered the stairs my pair of urban explorers had found. I climbed up. I followed the rest of their directions until I came to the door in the middle of the rooms up in the dome. The door was unlocked, and that made me wonder why anyone would hide something like the DVDs there unless they were looking to be found out, or were just high-risk, or had read Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” one too many times.

  Of course, Caroline had liked puzzles, and she had read Poe, and I had a sudden thought that maybe she had hid the DVDs here, without the preacher knowing. It could be that way. Hid them in plain sight until needed, and if they were found, it would be on the preacher’s head. If it wasn’t all so tragic, it would be funny.

  I went inside the room. The place was full of boxes. I flashed the light around and looked in the open ones. I was in there for a while, poking around in boxes, weaving my way through stacks of this and that, and then I noticed the room was becoming lighter. The little round flying-saucer-style windows in the dome were taking in the morning light and throwing it around, and now in the apple-colored glow I could see cobwebs were stretched over some of the windows and the light coming through those appeared to be shining through cracked glass. I looked at my watch. My time was nearly up. Sunrise would soon be complete.

  I moved around for another nervous fifteen minutes, and then at the back of the room I found a small, narrow box. It was under another box, a larger box. I found the little box because I knocked the bigger one over. It was full of Christmas decorations. I didn’t bother picking them up. I picked up the little box and glanced inside. The DVDs looked the same as the ones I had. They were numbered and there were maybe a dozen of them. Good God. How did the girl find the time? I figured I had maybe twenty-eight DVDs, counting those hidden in my apartment.

  I carried the box out of the room and down the stairs and went out the back way. When I got outside sunlight was falling ripe over the steps, and by the time I changed shoes and got down to the creek bed it was morning.

  Just before I went over the lip of the creek bed, down toward the culvert, my box of DVDs in hand, I looked back at the dome on the church. It glowed bright gold in the morning light, and for a moment, looking
at it, you could almost believe in something bigger than humanity, more thoughtful and kinder than the Big Bang.

  For a moment.

  24

  I made my way through the culvert without seeing my friend the water moccasin, and put the DVDs in the saddlebag on the motorcycle, folded up the cardboard box with a bit of effort and crunched it small enough to go into one of the saddlebags. I changed shoes again, and pushed the bike up the hill, then cranked it and rode out of there. I stuck the ski mask in my windbreaker pocket as I rode. The cool wind was still there, but there was starting to be a few worms of heat in it.

  I was excited about my find, and I drove by Jimmy’s thinking of showing it to him, but I didn’t stop. Wasn’t any point. He would be asleep now, and if he wasn’t, Trixie would be, so there was nothing to do there. I drove around town, keyed up about what we had learned and about the DVDs I had in my saddlebags. They were just more of the same, but it made what the kids told us true, and somehow I found that satisfying. I think I was feeling high on my exploration as well. Knew then what gave the kids their charge, sneaking around in forbidden places.

  I drove by Gabby’s office. It was way too early for her to be open, but I liked driving by anyway. Then I drove by her house because I couldn’t help myself. In times of excitement, depression or just plain confusion, the urge hit me. Every time I thought I had let it go, the need would come back again, like some deep-buried coal under a load of wet leaves; the coal flamed up and the leaves became dry, and pretty soon there were flames.

  When I went by her address, I saw her car in the carport, and I saw something unexpected.

  Jimmy’s motorcycle.

  At first I thought it must be Gabby’s bike, because I didn’t want to think any other way, but I didn’t remember her riding bikes. I had ridden with Jimmy back then, him and Trixie, and Gabby had never wanted to ride herself, not control the bike anyway. She would ride on the back, her face pushed up against my back, but she never seemed to like it and was always glad when we stopped.