Lucky's Girl, page 1
William Holloway
Lucky's Girl by William Holloway
First published in 2014 by
Horrific Tales Publishing
http://www.horrifictales.co.uk
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Copyright © 2014 William Holloway
The moral right of William Holloway to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
eBook Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
William Holloway would like to acknowledge the following persons: First, Graeme Reynolds. In reading the High Moor books and seeing the creative output of Horrific Tales I was really intimidated in submitting Lucky's Girl. I just wasn't sure about this one. Turns out he liked it, and here we are…
I'd also like to thank Simon Marshall Jones for the painstaking editing this one required, Lisa Jenkins for the proof reading and Stephen Bryant for the cover artwork.
Last but not least, our long suffering Beta Readers Kerri Patterson and Vix Kirkpatrick. Thanks guys, you all did fantastic work!
PART 1
THEIR MASTER’S VOICE
CHAPTER 1
Lucky needed a new gig. All this riding around waiting for a sign was lame. He felt it in his shoulders and chest; there was a vibe buzzing like a horsefly at the edge of his mind. Sometimes he could see it in the leaves carried on the breeze, sometimes on the wind carrying them. But when everything was at stake, he needed to take it to the next level. He needed to Read the Signs, and he’d taken some risks to be here.
He went to Target dressed like a square, and had a couple kids knock over mannequins for a distraction to make his play. He knew where to find the right kids; young girls with young girls’ attempts at pop star make up, big costume jewelry and sweaty little boyfriends with braces too big for their faces. He sat in the booth next to them and in minutes they were off on their assignment, then in the back of cop cars on petty vandalism charges. He got a five finger discount on a Red Rider BB gun, a handy tool for times like this.
And this time he really needed it.
Over the years he’d come closer and closer to assembling the perfect tribe from the flotsam and jetsam of the California fringe. Hippies, junkies and castoffs looking for direction. He gave them something to live for, and they gave him everything they had. Body and soul, in word and deed they’d become his.
But sooner or later the Child Protective Services would take notice, the cops would show up, and he’d slip out and hit the road. But this time they weren’t just crashing a hippie cult in the desert, they were looking for him by his street name: Lucky. And this time it was the Feds. They probably didn’t know his real name because the bikers didn’t know it. Neither did the girls. When he set up a tribe he would go by a guru name: Father Faith, Ram Goa, Chris Crucial, to name just a few.
His first lady called handcuffed to a detective’s desk. The feds were pushing charges of meth distribution. One by one the girls had called to say they loved him and to come spring them from these bogus charges so they could fuck and fuck and fuck. They knew he was innocent but The Man couldn’t let a prophet go without crucifying him. They didn’t know their SSI checks bought the speed the bikers moved for him. They didn’t know about his bank account, but the Feds had known and cleaned it out.
Hence the lack of funding for the BB Gun.
He needed a new gig, and he needed it bad.
The shack in the desert was east of Bakersfield, his retreat when shit would get out of hand. Just an old shack with four sun-faded cars, with flat tires and paint peeling off in big curling scabs, one for each time he’d lost a tribe to the cops. They were the last thing he cared about. He had gear buried under the shack. Tent, sleeping bag, three hundred in cash. Tools to get the Harley running. No more driving around like a square.
But that had to wait. He built a fire, then closed off his mind until all the anger and tension fell from his frame. He chanted strings of syllables until rhythms began, patterns formed, and order emerged from the morass of sounds.
Ket-mat-na-roz, keh-pi-uh, ja-quey, tae-lae, bas-nef-tek.
It felt familiar.
Powerful. Like lightning or an earthquake.
His eyes flew open and he sucked air.
Yes, this was the refrain.
His hand went to the pillowcase full of writhing, injured animals. Squirrels, chipmunks, and a cat with a collar that said Beatrice. He held her by the scruff of the neck and inserted the knife under the sternum, opening the abdomen, holding the thrashing cat in one hand while he examined the entrails in the other.
Ket-mat-na-roz, keh-pi-uh, ja-quey, tae-lae, bas-nef-tek.
Once, twice, five more times, until the fire was rank with steaming guts.
At the end of this divination he knew more, but the way was still dark.
The Big Tree was beckoning him home after all these years. He would have a new tribe, one which would fulfill him like none had before. He would be chieftain, and take back what was rightfully his, and so be avenged on those who had brought him injustice.
***
Kenny McCord looked for the right place to send the rock skipping over the water. His arm darted out and he hit the sweet spot between two dirty waves, the rock jumping twice before plunging under. The water was brown, the horizon was brown. That’s just how Houston was: dirty and brown. He reached for another stone, but hesitated as his fingers started questing in the wet sand. No, he could spend hours or even days matching that last skip. A perfect skip was the right way to leave this shithole.
On the horizon, he could see the oil rigs, but he didn’t begrudge the hazardous job, or the mortgage company repo’ing his house.
He blamed the place. Some towns are just bad.
Twenty-odd years ago he had blamed the backwoods town in the U.P. and had left for greener pastures. A place with no waiting list for jobs sawing down trees.
Houston; where there were more jobs than people.
His kids were in the back seat of his truck, his welding rig behind them. He’d left everything else behind. There were nothing but bad memories here. He wished his kids didn’t have to see this but he was beat and they were retreating. He wiped away the tear hanging at the edge of his eye. He was surprised he still had any.
One last look at the horizon, fading towards sunset. Beautiful in its dirty brown way, but dead to him now. God had given, and Houston had taken away, and there was only retreat. He turned his back to the sunset, closing his eyes. He breathed in and out again, then headed for the truck.
***
Jenny was wearing black knockoff wayfarers. The first time Kenny had seen them he had thought she’d looked like her mother the day they’d met at the diner. Just a bit too mature for a twelve year-old girl. He didn’t say anything. He just wanted to spend quality time with Jenny and Jake, not an absentee dad who showed up, yelled, and then left.
Of course when he’d first met Kelly it had been a whole other ballgame. He was nineteen and good looking. She was nineteen and the most provocative thing he’d ever seen. Like one of those pin-up girls painted on the side of a WW2 bomber in wayfarers and a waitress get-up. She had big almond-shaped eyes with lashes curling up at the edges and lips which did the same.
Jenny looked like her mother.
Despite how his daughter looked now, a smile formed inside his head thinking of that silly day at the 59 Diner. He’d stood in front with his bags, waiting for the van to take him to the rig for a three week tour of duty. She’d walked by and had given him a smile.
He’d missed that van: he’d had just one concern in the world – the waitress in wayfarers, consequences be damned. He’d sat himself in her section but the manager had thrown him out, but he’d gotten her phone number. His mind drifted to the vision of their wedding. Her parents hadn’t approved, they’d wanted a doctor or a lawyer. But she wanted him, the kid from Michigan who welded underwater on oil rigs; the kid from nowhere who had no parents, just a weird old Vietnam Vet uncle who’d raised him in a shack.
The shack they were headed to right now.
Kelly’s parents had raised her up right, with her head screwed on straight. He wondered if he could be the dad Kelly’s father was. He wondered if Jenny would let him. He wondered if Jake would let him. He looked in the rearview mirror and briefly caught their eyes. Jenny looked back out the window. Jake didn’t have imitation wayfarers to cover his disdain.
Being a dad is a big job, and any jury would say Kenny did his best. Everyone at work had told him that. His kids’ teachers had told him that, as well as the company counselor. But it didn’t matter. If I’d only been there, I would have seen the signs, I could have stood in between my family and the twin trains that crushed them.
He thought he was a good husband and father. He’d picked up extra shifts so his family could have more. They’d had a two storey house, two cars, and his kids had new school clothes every year. He was willing to be away and work one of the most dangerous jobs
But it wasn’t the right thing, was it?
He hadn’t noticed that Kelly had been tired and had lost weight. He’d just assumed she was on some diet. Not that he cared, he liked her however he could have her. But he was so tired himself that he hadn’t noticed she was skinny and slept all the time. By the time she’d got the first nosebleed it was too late.
He hadn’t said a thing when Jenny had started wearing those clothes and listening to that music. The kids on TV were like that, affecting the halfwit vacancy pop culture standard. But even if he had said something she would have charmed him out of it. She was daddy’s girl and he would give her anything she wanted. He was so proud of her and her precociousness. She’d had an Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof attitude at the age of five. The little boys in her classes couldn’t manage a sentence around her. Kelly said she’d be a movie star, but they’d need a fence to keep the boys away when they got up the nerve to say hello.
But it wasn’t boys her age who did it. And it wasn’t just one. The imitation wayfarers covered big yellowing bruises, and her clothes covered the rest, most of them at least.
***
Sheriff Jerry Kaminsky stared at the antique computer, exhaled a stream of Marlboro smoke, and shook his head. He leant back in the metal folding chair and considered throwing the Styrofoam cup at the wall while cursing his life.
The email spelled out that Elton Township was getting royally fucked and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. But this was par for the course. It was fucked up, it was wrong, he hadn’t seen it coming, but neither did it surprise him. Yeah, this was bad news, but everything about Elton Township was bad news.
He’d stopped throwing coffee cups twenty-odd years ago when he’d started drinking again. The coffee hid the whiskey which was keeping his hands from shaking. It would be a waste of booze. He’d been making little more than minimum wage since the budget cuts. He simply couldn’t afford to throw this coffee cup. Whiskey, coffee, and Styrofoam cups cost money. The only things the county and state paid for were the little stationhouse, and his car.
The email was from that hyper little twerp from Ann Arbor, professor of North American Archeology and all around Democrat asshat, Shelby Stiles. Even his faggy name bugged the shit out of Jerry.
Apparently Stiles’s operation had fallen to the same fate everything requiring the green stuff had in this state. Their funding had been cut. He’d shot off the email in the middle of the night and got the fuck out of Elton Township. He was probably across the Mackinac bridge by now.
Stiles had left his “project” halfway done. That meant Elton Lake was now a non-lake until someone could remove the dam Stiles’s money had built to drain the lake for their archeological dig. Someone, somewhere had actually given taxpayer money for that wheezy twit to dam up their little offshoot of the Paint River. It was professor Stile’s theory that Grove Island was actually a Menominee Indian mound. Now, mind you, it wasn’t really the Menominee Indians but their ancestors removed by several thousand years who, in a fit of Stone Age inspiration, had dug access to the Little Cedar River and had flooded the area around the mound with water. And they’d done it with stone tools. And Stiles was going to “prove” this theory… except he’d lost his funding and there was no more money to remove that dam. Elton Township had no jobs, no money, and now no lake.
It hadn’t even been a big lake; there were no fish in it for some reason, but at least it looked nice. You could ice skate on it in the winter. Now even that wasn’t going to happen.
The only reason Kaminsky hadn’t blown a gasket when Stiles had originally rolled into town was that he’d hired ten locals to build the dam. Ten guys who wouldn’t be asking Reverend James (the Rev to his congregation) at the Elton Township Church of the Pentacost for help with the groceries.
For guys like Jerry Kaminsky, when balancing out bad and worse, good intention always fucked you.
He pulled out the bottle from his top drawer for an extra splash of whiskey, downing the lukewarm stuff in one gulp. He looked at his hand. Not shaking anymore. That last splash had done the trick. Maybe he was headed to where no amount could stop those shakes. He knew one day he’d be there, but didn’t know when. He would lock up three or four guys a week for drunk driving, and was legally drunk while doing it. One day this whole sham would fall apart.
He sighed and shook his head.
He’d have to ask the Rev for volunteers to remove Stile’s dam. He’d have to tell Reverend James that he wouldn’t be able to pay but at least there would be ice skating this winter. It wasn’t going to be easy. It was reinforced concrete.
He would have to wear the humble public servant face and bring in the Mayor. He was a good guy, one of the few non-drunks in the town, a guy named Errol Wilson. He was also the mailman, and Jerry’s deputy when he needed one. He really needed two full-time, but hadn’t had any in years. Same old story, no money. The Mayorship was an unpaid position, Errol did it out of the kindness of his heart.
Bringing Errol would spare Jerry that look and, in the worst case, the talk.
The look that said, “I know you’ve been drinking,” and the talk which said, “You need to come back to AA.”
The AA meeting was held in the basement of the church, and for twenty-odd years Jerry had been a regular. Reverend James and his wife would always host the meeting, laying out coffee and homemade cookies, as well as greeting everyone. They’d pick people up in the church van, driving them home afterwards. The Rev was kind and good to everyone no matter how far gone they were. He was also the last person Jerry wanted see just then, after tuning up to stave off the shakes. Later on he’d be fine; decaf and mouthwash would see to that.
The radiophone squawked, Errol’s voice cutting through. His deputy/mailman/town mayor. “Sheriff, you there? Jerry?”
It was nine in the morning so Errol would probably be reporting a crashed car from last night’s drinking, hopefully unoccupied. “Morning, Errol, what’s the good news this time?”
“Okay, Jerry, you know I wouldn’t bug you this early but it’s Sheila Running Bear’s dog, Scooter.”
Jerry smiled. An American Indian had named her dog Scooter.
Jerry cleared his throat. “So… Scooter?”
It was obvious from the sound Errol was holding his hand over the radiophone to prevent anyone from hearing them. “Sheriff our visitors came back and there ain’t nothing but fur left. They did it right in front of her, and one even bit her when she tried to stop it.”
Jerry was at full attention now. This was exactly what the State Wildlife people had said wouldn’t happen. “Was it the alpha? Was it her?”
Jerry could visualize Errol’s head vigorously nodding up and down. “Yep it was Blackie, and people’re gonna be even more spooked.”
“I’m on my way, Errol. Just try to keep them calm.”
CHAPTER 2
Kenny sat in the truck watching the men’s room door of the rest stop. Even before having kids these places had scared and disgusted him. Every pervert abduction scenario focused on places like this. A big van with black windows rolls up and the kids or the wife disappears. Variations on Silence of the Lambs and The Hitcher.
This fear was omnipresent after what had happened to Jenny. He couldn’t live in a city like Houston anymore. Everywhere, hungry faces appraised his kids. Out here it was no better. Truckers seemed especially suspicious, as did buses full of migrant workers. People with no fixed address, transients with a gleam in their eyes, just waiting for an opportunity to take his children…
“Daddy, I really gotta go. I’m gonna pee my pants!”
He turned to look at Jenny. Despite the big fake wayfarers he could see her fear. She was about to piss herself.
“Daddy it hurts!”
He turned back to the door of the men’s room. No sign of his Jake. If he took Jenny to the women’s room he wouldn’t be able to see Jake emerging out of the men’s room. Jake wouldn’t know where his family had gone.
