Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [78]
Slammer lowers the grocery bags, shoulders aching, as if he’d been holding sacks of rocks.
“What’d I do?”
Slammer is drowning in panic. He is seventeen years old, a long way from last night’s tears, but the memory of terror is right there.
“Just tell me what I did wrong, okay? So we can talk about it maybe.”
The terror comes from Slammer’s incarceration in the Mississippi Training School, the type of state-run correctional institution for juveniles where they strip you naked and throw you in a freezing cell, hogtie you, and withhold medical care. Slammer had a toothache so bad and so unattended, the abscess ate into his jaw. He was put there in sixth grade for being chronically late to his regular school. This was because his birth mother was an alcoholic and slept all day. When he was released, he hitchhiked west to live with his father. The Mississippi Training School is currently under federal investigation.
“You did not complete the mission,” Stone replies, “you ungrateful little shit.” Now his eyes seem pinched and tired.
“I am grateful. You got me off the streets, man.” He bounces around the kitchen, flinging his arms.
“I gave you a job, to kill Herbert Laumann,” Stone says philosophically. “You failed.”
“Hey, I’m still up for the Big One.”
Slammer thinks he is showing loyalty by endorsing the bandit’s mysterious plan—“the Big One” that will “bring down the house.” Now he takes up another of the bandit’s themes.
“I didn’t do it because the FBI is watching us, dude. They’re tapping our phones, following us around—”
“Someone surely is. But the larger point I’m trying to get at,” Stone says, “is that people around here do what I tell them to.”
Discipline.
“Of course. That’s a given.” Slammer smiles with fine white teeth. The sight of his smile is beautiful and rare, like an eagle in flight. “You’re the Allfather.”
“I gave you a gun,” he says. “I gave you my trust. You abused it.”
“They weren’t home!” Slammer protests, thick lips blubbering. “I would’ve done it—but they weren’t home!”
“Come with me. I am the tax collector,” Stone says.
“Hey, what about the ice cream?”
“Put the ice cream away.”
Slammer may be wildly thinking of attack or escape, but in the end, he goes quietly. The bandit did not even have to show the gun.
It is dark when Sara and I get back from picking Megan up from the airport after Lillian’s memorial service. We took along a new black-and-white kitten we’d adopted in order to cheer Megan up. I am driving. I take my eyes from the road for an instant—to smile at Sara’s pretty profile as she teases the little guy with a tassel on her bag—when she looks up and shrieks, “Oh my God!” and I slam the brakes.
The tires kick up gravel and the pickup fishtails to a stop. In the white glare of the headlights we see Slammer’s head sticking out of a hole in the ground, in which Dick Stone is burying him up to the neck.
Slammer’s garish face is red and contorted and stained with tears. At eye level with the chassis of the truck, he has been screaming for us to stop.
We rush out of the car like fiends let loose, washed out almost to transparency by the hot light, all three of us shouting and reaching through ribbons of iridescent dust to stop it, stop him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Megan bellows at Stone as I grab for the shovel.
“He’s a traitor.”
We wrestle for the handle, and he’s strong, flailing wildly, like someone beating at the bars that imprison them.
“I gave him a gun. He didn’t do the job.”
“What job?” Megan cries, pulling futilely on his shirt. “What job? What job?”
“The boy has turned on me,” says Stone. “The FBI is all around us. What is he? A cocksucking little wimp ass piece of shit.”
“Talk to me, Julius,” I gasp, watching Sara emerging from the dark with a heavy pitchfork. “What do you want?”
Stone’s voice has dropped to a mocking growl. “Tell them about the atrocities. Tell them about the lies.”
“Help me,” Slammer sobs, twisting futilely in his