Nowhere People (Nowhere, USA Book 7) Read online

  “You drunken …” followed by expletives as profane and colorful as any Fish had ever heard.

  The words faded into the distance behind Fish as he drove away from Orville’s body, away from the cemetery in the direction of the Middle of Nowhere.

  He literally slid to a stop in the parking lot of the veterinary clinic, likely looked like a slalom skier at the bottom of a hill. If there’d been snow, he’d have plowed a wave of it up onto the clinic steps.

  Leaping out of the car, he almost fell. He was weak, nothing to eat, and the adrenaline that had fueled his car theft was leaving him. Only a little farther, he told himself, ping-ponging off the roof post, and then the door jamb as he staggered into the waiting room.

  Nobody was seated at the reception desk. The room’s only occupant was an old man he didn’t recognize, so he ran through the doorway into the hallway of the clinic. Nobody was there, either so he just yelled out.

  “Hey, somebody. Charlie, Sam, Malachi. Somebody …” Then the last of his energy reserves gave out and he drooped to his knees.

  “Help. Somebody, help.”

  Raylynn Bennett appeared at a doorway about halfway down the hall.

  “Where’s Charlie?” Fish cried. “Sam or Malachi … where?”

  “They’re not here. You just missed them. They went to Fearsome Hollow to—”

  “Not here?” Fish couldn’t process that. “When will they be back?”

  Raylynn shook her head slowly, a frightened little girl.

  “I don’t know … they might not—”

  “Might be they ain’t coming back.” Pete Rutherford had appeared in a doorway farther down the hallway. His already gruff voice had a ragged edge.

  Fish stared at him in disbelief.

  “But … but I have to talk …” He looked beseechingly into Pete’s eyes. “You don’t understand. They have to stop her.”

  “Stop who?”

  “Viola Tackett. She’s … she’s going to shoot people.”

  “What people?”

  “Anybody. Everybody. And she won’t stop until …” His voice failed and he drew a shuddering breath. “She won’t stop. Not ever. Not until they’re all dead.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Judd Perkins’ phone rang as he was closing his back door behind him and he almost didn’t bother to go back inside to answer it. But it might be Doreen, something with the girls. He’d finally convinced her to move back into the house with him, so he could look after them. She was packing them up today and they’d be here when he got back tonight from his turn sitting up with E.J.

  E.J. was going to die. Judd wasn’t no doctor, but you didn’t have to have no medical degree to see that the man was failing. He wouldn’t likely live long enough to get rabies, which was not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all. Oh, it wasn’t that Judd had given up hope that they’d get out of this thing, that somebody’d … well, do something and the Jabberwock would vanish quick as it’d come and they’d get E.J. to a doctor in time. He still hoped …

  No, he didn’t. He wouldn’t let anybody — Doreen or the girls or E.J., anybody — know that, of course, know he didn’t believe no more. Shoot, he wouldn’t even let himself know it most of the time. But in his heart of hearts a coldness had settled in. Partly fear, maybe mostly fear. But resignation, too. Like he’d felt when he finally accepted that Mildred’s cancer wasn’t going to get no better, that she wasn’t going to get well and grow all her hair back and fix him eggs and pancakes for breakfast and train Buster to answer commands in German.

  When he’d understood the reality of that, had shifted that gear, his whole world perspective had changed. The hole in his belly where hope had been was so huge at first he was afraid his whole self would fall into it and disappear. But his focus had been sharper, too. Like tunnel vision, seeing something through binoculars. Every second, every breath his precious Mildred took was significant after that. He took note of every one. Paused on every one, appreciated and was grateful for the breath and didn’t demand anything beyond that. In that instant, he was merely grateful for that frozen moment of time, didn’t spoil it by pining away for what he didn’t have.

  He had felt that shift in himself again in the past couple of days. Ever since E.J. had given his life to save Michelle and Julie Ann, Judd’d watched E.J. slip away and hope slipped away with him. Now, when Judd was honest with himself, which he wouldn’t allow himself to be very often, he acknowledged that every breath of every person in the county — his daughter and precious granddaughters — everybody, was to be treasured and appreciated. They wouldn’t last.

  Soon’s he got home tonight, he was gonna set both them girls in his lap and tell them funny stories like Mildred used to do when they was little. He’d tell tales about Buster, too. He hadn’t mentioned the dog’s name to the girls since … Judd had dug a deep hole near the back fence and buried what was left of the poor thing soon’s he got home from taking E.J. to Sam. But tonight, he was gonna talk about Buster. Wasn’t the dog’s fault what’d happened. It was Judd’s for not getting him vaccinated. All the dog had ever done was be a good, loyal friend and Judd wasn’t going to dishonor his memory by acting like he hadn’t never existed. He was going to hug the little girls close, smell the fruity clean smell of their freshly washed hair, and glory in every breath they took.

  He didn’t know what form their end would take, but he would be there with his family to love and protect them until that final breath. He hoped they’d be ‘lowed to take that one together.

  Stepping back into the house, Judd went to the phone on the kitchen wall and lifted the receiver.

  “‘Lo.”

  “Pete Rutherford, here. We got ourselves a problem.” Judd coulda said, “Tell me something I don’t already know,” but the tone of Pete’s voice silenced him. “Need you to get your rifle and lots of ammunition. Meet me and Lester at the hardware store.”

  Then Pete told him why.

  “It seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.”

  Lester Peetree smiled as the words formed in his head. Our Town. Mr. Fischer had let Lester’s son, William Lester Peetree, Jr. — just Willie — read the part of the narrator of the play when the boy was in high school — because Lester had begged Fish to. He’d thought the experience of reading it aloud would paint the words on his son’s soul the way his own reading of it, alone in his bedroom, squinting at the words on the library book page, had done for him. He’d been wrong. Willie hadn’t cared a fig about Our Town, had been bored by the experience of reading it aloud in front of a bunch of disinterested, pimple-faced teenagers in Holmes Fischer’s English class. Even though the play had completely changed his father’s whole life.

  Okay, maybe not changed it, but certainly informed it. That play, superimposed on all the years since he’d read it, had been the lens through which Lester Peetree had viewed the world. He sometimes thought that just about all the wisdom there was in all the world was contained within that single Pulitzer Prize-winning drama.

  Well, except the part about going to a country where they didn’t speak English. He’d done that. He had for a fact, and he had returned to testify, if anybody’d asked and nobody ever did, that it was way, way better to stay home, right where you was at, live life there and die there and never know what kind of incredible evil dwelled out there in the world beyond.

  Lester would say that today with as much conviction as he’d said it when he got home from Vietnam, spent miserable months enduring flashbacks of little kids with their clothes on fire, or dead bodies swollen and bloated and stinking — cows, pigs, people. Or the unrecognizable corpses of dead friends. Or a leg. Just a leg. Ripped off at the thigh, naked — no uniform pants, no socks or boots. Lester had been ridiculously troubled by that at the time, thought about it for months. George Phillips. Lester had seen him just moments before the world erupted into tiny points of brilliant light and th
e man’s body had been completely blown apart by a mortar shell, pieces flung into the faces of his friends. So … where were George’s pants? How could a mortar shell blow your boots and socks off? How could that be?

  Lester would have said then that the most profound evil in the world could be defined with one little word, three simple letters. W. A. R. War was all evil. Every second, every breath, every eye blink, nothing but evil.

  But war wasn’t all the evil there was. He had learned that, too, over the years. Certainly had had his nose rubbed in that reality since J-Day when an impossibility had changed reality and everybody in the county’s understanding of it. The thing, the Jabberwock, the monster that was systematically — what was it Charlie McClintock called it? Absorbing — everybody within the county’s borders was evil, too.

  It wasn’t all the evil, though. Human hearts … evil resided in human hearts, blackened and shriveled them.

  You couldn’t let that evil win. Not in war. Not in everyday life. You stood up to it or you couldn’t lay claim to any good in your own soul.

  Lester Peetree hadn’t fired his rifle in more than thirty years. To this day, didn’t know why he’d said yes when his sergeant offered to let him keep the weapon. He’d put the gun and his uniform away, along with the box of medals he had resolutely refused to allow anybody to see. Not even his wife. Willie had found them when he was ten years old and hauled them out, asked what they were. Lester’d sent the boy to his room, wouldn’t let him come down even for supper because he’d disobeyed Lester’s ironclad rule that nobody … nobody ever went into that storage room in the back corner of the hardware store. After that, Lester kept it secure with a padlock as big as his fist.

  Lester stood in the storage room now, lifting the rifle out of the scabbard and hating how natural it felt to hold the thing again. He slicked his hand over his bald head — shaved because bald was more attractive, or so Ramona had said, than the ever-expanding patch of bare skin that had attacked him before he even turned forty.

  He glanced at his watch. He was supposed to meet Pete Rutherford in the store at 11:30. Pete had said he’d be bringing along Judd Perkins. Judd was maybe ten years older, hadn’t served in Vietnam. But he was the acknowledged “best shot” in the county, as evidenced by all the game he’d felled — some from six, seven hundred yards — with one shot over the years and all the blue ribbons he’d won in the shooting contests at the county fair. Lester never entered those contests, so nobody ever knew he could likely out-shoot Judd Perkins seven ways to Sunday. Nobody ever would know, because Lester had put his rifle away when he got back home and never fired it again. Oh, he kept the rifle immaculate and in perfect working order, maintained like it was brand new. Every gun owner owed that kind of respect to his weapon. Just left it locked up was all. Same as everybody else in the county, he had other weapons he used for hunting, and sold all manner of them in the store — or had until somebody broke into it a week ago and stole every bit of inventory.

  They hadn’t stolen this rifle because didn’t nobody but Ramona know it even existed — well, Willie’d seen it that one time when he was a kid. It was locked away where nobody would ever steal it, where nobody would ever even fire it again — or so Lester had assumed when he put the gun out of sight, out of mind, in that storage room all those years ago.

  It was a Ruger 10/22 automatic with a suppressor. A sniper rifle.

  Lester Peetree had been a sniper. Served at a base in Da Nang in what the military called “Arizona Territory.”

  He never thought about it, had learned how not to think about it, but as he held the weapon now in his hands he considered the number again. Seventy-one. Lester Peetree had seventy-one confirmed kills from a two-year tour in Vietnam. There’d been more than that. Lots more. Those were just the ones that’d been “confirmed” by observers. Lester Peetree had killed way more than seventy-one Cong. Not as many as the Marine, Chuck Mawhinney, though, who had once landed sixteen headshots in thirty seconds in pitch black darkness. Mawhinney had 103 confirmed and 216 probable kills in just sixteen months in country.

  Lester’d never talked to the man — though he served in the Arizona Territory same as Lester — but he bet the Marine felt the same way Lester did about it. Lester’s job was to wipe evil off the face of the earth. Pure and simple. The Cong had been verifiably evil, demonstrably so. They were the enemy, of course, but they were way more than that. They were soul-less monsters who strapped bombs to little kids, burned old people alive and roasted rats on a stick in the flames. They stalked the jungles, killing whole villages full of innocent people, shooting them one after another, looking for a single American sympathizer.

  That’s what Pete Rutherford said Viola Tackett intended to do right here in Nowhere County.

  “She’s just gonna pick people at random and shoot ‘em, one after another until she finds out who killed her daughter. Fish said he thinks it was her own boy, Neb, done it. Accidental. But you ain’t never gonna convince Viola Tackett of that.”

  Lester had been at the county meeting where Liam’d got shot, believed it was Viola done it, though he had been where he couldn’t see so he didn’t know for sure. He did know she’d hanged that teenage boy, Martha Whittiker’s grandson … Dylan something. Just hanged him. It had fallen to Lester to take charge of the morgue in the basement of Bascum’s so he seen it all, up close and personal, had been the one took the rope off the boy’s neck where it had dug in so deep it would have bled, except there was no heart to pump blood by then.

  Wasn’t a doubt in Lester’s mind that Viola Tackett was evil, same’s the Cong. He was certain she would make good on her threat. Only thing standing between her and a mass murder was him, Pete and Judd Perkins. That woman didn’t have no conscience, no soul. Wasn’t no way to stop her but to put her down. Either him, Pete or Judd Perkins was gonna have to do just that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The boys had got back from they errands and most everything had gone according to Viola’s plan.

  She’d sent Zach in his fancy Vette to Pine Bluff Hollow, around Hollow Tree Ridge down to Poorfolk Hollow. She’d sent Obie to Nate’s Creek Hollow, through Killarney to Turkey Neck Hollow and back through Harrow Woods.

  She didn’t have nobody to send to Soloman Hollow, Little McGuire Hollow and down Lexington Road to Route 19 and Frogtown, but Zach got done quick so she sent him there. Didn’t send nobody to Fearsome Hollow cause didn’t hardly anybody live there.

  The boys honked they horns and called folks out of they houses to see their full tanks of gasoline, and handed out five-gallon cans to them as didn’t have enough gas to get to town for the meeting.

  Neb was driving Howie Witherspoon’s pokey old Dodge and he had stayed close, starting in Bugtussle Hollow, around Bishop Mountain to Freeman Hollow, then through Wiley to Chicory Hollow.

  Something was wrong with Neb. Viola didn’t know what it was, but something had got his goat. Must be the awful of finding his sister like that, shot and dying on the porch. Well, whoever’d done that grievous deed was gonna be held to account for it this day, and the group of men gathered before her on the too-tall grass in the front yard of the Tackett House was gonna help her administer justice.

  She looked out over the group of lowlifes and sighed. Ever one of them was dumber than the next.

  Merl Pickett had a dent in the middle of his forehead — you could see it — where his daddy’d throwed him out of the car while it was still moving. His brother said it was ‘cause he’d farted in the car, but Viola wondered sometimes if he’d just made that part up. Merl wasn’t as stupid as he looked, though, with that dent and that one black eyebrow stretching across both eyes. He might have been the smartest of the lot, but that wasn’t saying much.

  Hoyt Wilmer had a wad of snuff under his front lip big as a golf ball. He spit juice out onto the ground when he talked, about every fourth word, and it’d dribbled down the front of his red-and-black checked shirt.

  Bolyard and Delb
ert Scully was brothers, or so they thought, and so did they daddy. Viola didn’t. She was sure Bolyard was not Angus Scully’s seed, that his Mamie had gone out and found her somebody else to rut around with because that boy absolutely did not fit in that family.

  Viola knew about such things. But Malachi looked a whole lot more like his half-brothers than Bolyard Scully looked like his. Bolyard’s brothers was all red-headed and freckle-faced, had blue eyes so pale it was creepy to look at them. Bolyard was dark, brown hair and muddy brown eyes. He looked like a Mexican and maybe he was. They was illegals worked on the horse farms up around Lexington and maybe Mamie had spread her legs for one of them.

  They was others, Clarence Thacker, Buster Willard, Jethro Bodean and the Monroe brothers, Bubba and Felix, whose matching beards put Viola in mind of the Smith Brothers on a box of cough drops. Fifteen, maybe sixteen or seventeen altogether. She didn’t count noses and Bufford Pettigrew and Hulan Gibson was still getting out of they truck. She didn’t need half this many! Coulda done it with her boys and three or four more. But she’d throwed out a net and these here was what she’d caught and a show of force this big would be intimidating — wouldn’t nobody go up against this many guns.

  All them men standing in her front yard was in her debt in some way, and she’d called in every single chip she had, and she had a lifetime’s worth. Wasn’t nothing she’d ever done mattered to her as much as finding out this day who had shot poor Essie down like a dog, and she intended to administer righteous wrath upon that person. When she had the time, she was gonna question Neb more about what’d happened, but he didn’t want to talk about it much. She hadn’t never seen him so upset over a thing and it made her proud he’d thought so much of Essie — though he sure hadn’t never showed it when she was alive. Didn’t none of them pay her no mind except Malachi. She had been able to pry out of Neb that he’d heard hollering and carrying on from the car that roared down the street, like maybe they was a bunch of people in it and maybe they’d been drinking. Bunch of drinking buddies, out tearing up stuff, might even be they didn’t mean no harm, though didn’t matter a fig whether they did or no, they’d caused harm and they was gonna pay dearly for it.