“Right again.”
“You trust her?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“But she gave us a bit of information. Some of it would groove nicely with what you’re telling me. Some of it. I think Frank might have a way of dressing up things so that it’s all in her color. Know what I mean?”
“Frank is an opportunist. She didn’t mind I got skunked and Sandy took over and that the Houston people took Sandy over. Long as she has a job and the money comes in, she’s hunky-dory with it. Don’t start thinking she’s got a conscience.”
“No need to worry,” I said.
“And Sandy, that bitch, she doesn’t get her clock cleaned, another five years and she’ll be running the Houston group, you mind my words.”
I thought: damn, if he’s telling it true, I’ve found Sandy, but Lilly Buckner will not have the cockles of her old and somewhat creaky heart warmed by my discovery. The thought of that made me feel deeply disappointed, as if I had somehow expected something different from the human race.
“Thinking about what you did to those bikers, and you coming here to talk to me, bold as the pope in his underpants, it’s got me thinking you might can find a way out for me.”
“Does it?” I said.
“It does.”
Doug leaned out of the booth and looked outside. I looked, too. His so-called bodyguard was in the front seat of the car with his head thrown back and his eyes closed.
“See?” he said. “Something happens to me, no one’s crying. But if you were to get rid of those hitters, then I’m not scared of who else they might bring. But you see, the cops, they can’t protect me from those Canceler motherfuckers, because cops and feds, they’re all entwined. Some of those Cancelers might just walk into the police station and shoot hell out of everyone while the cops are busy trying to open a box of fucking doughnuts. But if the Cancelers are gone, I would start to believe I can be protected long enough to squeal like a dying rat. I got stuff the feds would want. More and better than what they’re getting now. I got about twenty years’ worth of material, a lot of it on the Houston guys, the ones who have their peckers in most of the serious moneymaking crime in Texas, might be something the feds would trade for. I used to deal with the Houston assholes all the time, but they didn’t own me until Sandy came along, the crafty cunt.”
“So what you’re saying to me is I should see that the Cancelers are canceled, and then you’ll come forward and pin the tail on the donkey?”
“That’s the size of it.”
“How do I know if I get rid of them you won’t just go back to doing what you were doing before? Laying low and having sushi for lunch?”
“Because I want a nice witness relocation by the sea somewhere. Hell, I’d settle for the high desert, fucking mountains. I just want to start over and live the rest of my days reading books and pumping some good-looking widow with grown or dead children. Preferably the latter. Saves money at Christmas.”
“If I were to think this was a good deal, where would I find these Cancelers? How spread out are they? Where would I locate Sandy?”
“Sandy works out of Houston. She goes by the name Florence Gale. There’s some humor in that name somewhere. People she works for, the Houston crowd, they’ve done her up right. Got her named changed, given her a nice clean business front that hides the dirt under her fingernails.”
He reached out and touched my hand. I wasn’t expecting that.
“Do this for me, get rid of these Cancelers, then I’ll help you, and that will pull Sandy into the light. I’ll take my chances with the feds.”
I eased my hand away from his, leaned back in the booth, fastened my eyes on him.
“Let me explain something to you, Barbecue King. We do this, and then you welch, you won’t be doing any better than before, cause we’ll have to come see you. Understand?”
“You’re able to take out the Cancelers, then I figure you can take out me. I haven’t any reason to play you.”
44
They are believed to be of one family, and their father was a man named George Greely,” Doug said.
George Greely. It came back to me. He had been in the news some years back and is now part of criminal history as well as criminal legend, but not for being a mastermind—simply for personifying evil in human form.
George Greely had been in the military, and according to all the psychoanalysis by people who knew something, or people who knew nothing but thought they did, all the editorials and comments and news reports, Greely was the kind of guy that should clear your head from thinking everyone in uniform, or that’s worn a uniform, is a hero. The military suited him because it gave him structure. Something he hadn’t had early in life, as his father died when he was two and his mother left him to a couple who in turn gave him up to a orphanage. He became a bully, taking out all his anger for being abandoned on anyone smaller than him. He was a giant of a man, tall, with a barrel chest, dead-white skin, shark eyes, and a thick gray beard. I remembered seeing his photo in the newspapers.
When he left the military he lost his structure and tried to re-create it for himself with rigid rules about what he ate, when he ate, how he slept, and so on. He’d sleep on the floor with the window open in winter with nothing but a thin blanket over him. He read the Spartans did that, and it made them tough, and that’s what he wanted to be, a kind of Spartan.
He married a woman he could control. Told her what to wear and how to talk and who to talk to, kept her from using makeup and perfume, even body deodorant. Showers were once a week and don’t waste water and to hell with soap.
Greely finally decided she didn’t need to talk to anyone but him, period. He isolated her on a farm outside of Crockett, Texas, away from everyone, and there over the next thirty years he built a junkyard and scrap metal business. He and that poor woman had a passel of kids. Greely had kids not only by his wife, but in time, by one of his own daughters. Pretty soon this compound he made of mobile homes linked together was surrounded by a concrete-block fence ten feet high with barbed wire at the top. His land was a hundred acres bought when land was cheap, and five acres of that was Greely compound central.
Later, when they came to take away the bodies, they determined from survivors, cause there were a lot of children there, that the daughter Greely had a child by had managed to move out of the compound by not coming home from school, and in time, a year or so later, word drifted down to him that on the outside she found a boyfriend. Greely felt like a jilted lover and coaxed her and her boyfriend to the compound with promises of money and a slice of the land.
They showed up, he murdered them, and killed two of his older children just for sport while the others scattered like quail. He put their bodies in a pit that was beneath an outdoor privy. He then drove into Crockett with a plan to kill anyone he saw. His first pick was a police officer. Greely’s gun misfired, and after a ferocious fight, in which the police officer was assisted by citizens, Greely was arrested and taken away.
Greely told his story in a matter-of-fact way, and the papers were full of it for weeks. He mainly talked about guns and large knives and how he loved them, how he knew things that others didn’t, had some direct insight with God. He said God told him to do what he did, and no matter what man’s law was, he was right with God. God was testing his faith, same as Abraham and Job.
Bottom line was, some few years later the state of Texas gave him a hot shot. But the family, mostly boys, a few girls, survived. When the news lost interest in them, they slipped into obscurity. According to Doug, the Greely survivors had not learned a damn thing and had taken up their father’s habits of incest and fanatic gun and sharp-weapon love. Children were born between daughters and brothers, and they were raised in Greely’s unique way, out there among the junk in the compound; it was a family tradition.
In time most of the folks in the compound drifted away, a few died there. That left seven or eight boys. The number varied, depending on who w
as telling the story. No one knew much about them after that. The Barbecue King knew more than most, because he knew about the Cancelers, and he knew some of the people who hired them. They were all Greely men from early thirties on up. They had found their niche. In time they became the go-to boys for the Houston crew, the Dixie Mafia.
They were perfect. They killed as much for love as money, and they were isolated out there on their land, inside their compound. No one knew what they did or how they lived, because no one was allowed out there, and there was very little contact between the general population and the Greely clan.
“You know something about Greely,” Doug said, “then you know the Cancelers. They aren’t a bunch of fucking masterminds. It’s not like you could get them in a room and they could explain to you why they do it, other than for money. I would do it for money, situation was right, and I could see it as business, but not pleasure. They enjoy it. They have a need to do it. They are stone-cold killers, plain and simple. I’ve heard a rumor they’re all mute, but that could just be a story that gets told because there’s so little known about them and nothing known that came directly from them. I also know that the ones out there are the last of it. I guess they ran out of sisters to fuck. You won’t find a damn thing about them anywhere, because except when they’re on a job, they’re to themselves. You aren’t going to find some profile, or a list of crimes, because they’ve never been caught. Not because they’re so smart but simply because they know one thing. Isolate the prey and kill it, take the nut sack, leave. Here’s the good news, though. I do know this because I do get a whiff of what’s going on through my former company now and then—someone will drop something and I’ll hear it, pick it up, and tuck it away. I’m not a hundred percent isolated. Ones out there, those boys, they’re the last of it. When they’re gone the Cancelers have bought their last pairs of underwear. If they wear them.”
“You’re sure these guys are it?”
“One of the few things about them I’m sure of. As much as you can be sure of anything. I can’t be certain exactly how many of them there are, but I think what I’ve told you is more than reasonably accurate.”
“All right, then. Can you tell me where they are?”
45
With directions from my new pal Doug, me and Leonard drove out beyond Crockett, named after frontiersman Davy Crockett, who stopped there on his way to the Alamo and his date with destiny. We drove through Crockett into the boonies, where the woods grew wild. The hundred acres the Greelys owned were thick with woods, and there was one narrow dirt road that led into it. It was dark down that road, even in dead-solid daylight. Tree limbs came together from either side and knotted up with branches and leaves and made a kind of canopy over us. There was brush growing on the sides of the road, and there were long stems sticking out of the brush, waving in the gentle wind like great insect antennae.
I said, “This looks like the road to the witch’s house that Hansel and Gretel found.”
“What if it’s just a bunch of inbred motherfuckers he’s sent us out here to see? Shit stains on the ass of humanity, but maybe not killers at all.”
“Occurred to me,” I said.
“We get the gang together, come out here and kill them all, and they got nothing to do with any of this business. That would suck.”
“It would,” I said, “though I think Booger would be happy either way.”
We drove down a ways and found a gap where the local assholes tossed their trash instead of taking it to the dump. There was all kinds of rotting garbage there, including a dead white cat with its feet sticking out of a dilapidated plastic trash can crammed with all manner of stuff. Next to the trash can was a couch with springs poking through it, coiled and bobbing in the wind. There was a thin, well-worn path next to the road not too far from the trash heap, and that was the path we wanted.
I said, “Wait a minute, brother. Stop the car.”
Leonard stopped near the garbage heap. I got a shovel out of the back of the car and dug a hole by the trash can. I levered the cat out of the can with the shovel, dumped it into the hole, and covered it up.
“All done, Saint Francis?” Leonard said. He was still in the car with the window rolled down.
“All done,” I said and put the shovel away.
It was midafternoon, but as I said, it seemed later due to all the tree shadows and ink-dark clouds clustering together in the heavens and showing through the gaps in the trees, threatening rain. Leonard pulled the car up farther into the gap with the trash, pulled around behind a tree. It didn’t totally hide the car, but it was only noticeable if you were looking in exactly the right place.
We got our handguns, and Leonard got a pair of binoculars that were on a strap from the trunk of the car. He slipped the strap over his head and put a penlight in his pocket.
We walked back to the long road that led to the witch’s house and started down it. There were NO TRESPASSING signs as well as others that said TRAVEL AT YOUR OWN RISK and one that showed a gun pointed at us and the words: WE DON’T CALL 911.
We walked a long way. Finally the trees opened up and there was cleared land. Wild grass grew on it in spurts of green and yellow as well as twisted dead, gray grass. We walked along, and then Leonard said, “Hold it. Look there.”
The wind had done us a favor. It had lifted a patch of the dead grass enough that Leonard had spotted the outline of an opening in the ground. We moved over there cautiously. The dead grass had been dug out in lumps and stacked on top of a piece of thin ply board. Leonard got out his penlight and shined it into the crack. There really wasn’t anything to see. Leonard found another place to duck down and poke the light. Finally he laid down on the ground and lifted the ply board slightly and poked the light in.
“There’s a pit under that ply board,” he said. “It’s wide, and it’s very deep. They must have used a backhoe to make it. I could see a bit of water shining at the bottom. My guess is that ply board is just strong enough to hold the wads of grass, but had we walked across it, it would have folded. There’s a smell in the pit, like old shit. There are stakes down there, and the shit looks to be smeared on them. It was one of the Cong’s favorite tricks in Nam. You not only got the spikes, but if you survived, you got a tremendous infection that worked in the long term as well as a bullet. Old Man Greely spent time in the military, maybe Nam. He could have passed that on to his family, such as they were. It’s a fucking booby trap, and I’m going to guess there are others.”
“They may not use the road much,” I said, “but they use it, so they have some way around this stretch of land.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
We went back up the path a ways, stood and looked. It emptied right into that field, and beyond the booby trap was a thick swath of trees. The path split through them and turned slightly left. There was nothing visible of it beyond that.
“Look there,” Leonard said.
He was pointing to a spot to the right of the road. There were no trees there, just tall brush, and the brush was dead like the grass on top of the ply board, touched with dust from the road in a way that made it look as if it had been sprinkled with nutmeg. We walked over and peeled back the brush and took a look. On the other side of it was a narrow road, more of a trail, really. It wound down between the brush and trees.
“They have their own secret road,” Leonard said.
We got hold of the brush and found it was all wired together and on a wooden swivel. We pulled at it, and it slid back like a door.
“Let’s do a bit of recon,” Leonard said. “But watch for booby traps.”
We found one right away. There was a wire across the trail. I walked to one end of it, Leonard to the other. There was a little wooden box on both sides. Leonard said, “My guess is someone trips this wire, the box opens, and something shoots out, backed by an explosive. It could be glass, nails—hell, anything.”
“I’m starting to get nervous,” I said.
We s
tepped over the wire and went along. No more traps were discovered. In time the trail wound around a large patch of trees, and then there was another clearing, and in the center of that clearing, about an acre away, was a great wall of concrete blocks, just as the newspapers and the Barbecue King had described it. A huge Dixie flag snapped in the wind above it on a tall pole made from a skinned tree.
We squatted down at the edge of the trees and studied the place.
“See those cameras?” Leonard said.
I looked and saw. They were positioned in several places along the wall.
“Think they can see us?” I said.
Leonard lifted the binoculars and studied the wall.
“They look to be pointing down. I think we got within twenty feet of the wall they’d pick us up. I can see lights mounted near them, probably those automatic things that come on when they sense movement.”
“This seems to be more complex than I expected.”
“They may be white trash—inbred, fun-for-the-dollar killers,” Leonard said, “but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Inbreeding doesn’t always result in people with quarter-sized moles on their faces and a hole where their noses ought to be. It doesn’t do much for emotional development, though, and it confuses folks at family reunions.”
“What’s our plan now, bwana?”
“We play Jungle Jim. You see how the woods narrows when you look to the right side of the compound fence? We ought to go that way, be in the tree line. Might be the best bet for taking a closer peek at the place.”
46
The woods was full of heat-wilted greenery, crosshatched limbs, and briars, and it was dark and deep and painful to make our way through. I was stabbed and poked, ripped and torn, and I could feel ticks and chiggers crawling on me, racing over my flesh on a mission to create a warm nest of my pubic hair.
We came to a rise in the forest where the trees draped over a hill and thinned enough you could stand in a clearing and look at the compound. The narrow trail had some deeper grooves there from vehicles going down and climbing up the hill. The concrete-block wall did not go all the way around. There was a medieval-looking gate in the side that was wide enough to let a tank through.