Deceived

17

Mica Helms’s “home address” turned out to be a junkyard in Glades City, which I thought was an intentional error until I saw the dog. It was a brindle-yellow pit bull, the same alpha female that had attacked me Friday, minus her pack mate whose head had been found in a freezer.

By the time I saw the dog, it was too late.

I had parked and walked to the fence, which was chain-link, eight feet high, with razor wire at the top. Inside, among rows of wrecked cars, was a trailer that looked lived in, but a sign on the door read Office. There was also a gravel path that seemed to invite business. I tried hollering to get attention but a machine-a wood shredder, it sounded like-made so much noise, I couldn’t hear my own voice. The noise came at me in waves and was piercing, so I covered my ears as I walked to the gate. It was a sliding gate, not open but slightly ajar. I looked around and tried hollering again. Pointless. There was a Keep Out sign, but no warnings about a dog, so I slipped through the gate and walked toward the trailer.

Midway between the door and the fence, someone switched off the shredder, creating an explosion of silence that was so abrupt, I actually stopped and blinked my eyes. That’s when I heard a softer sound, a warning familiar from my nightmare, the low rumble of a dog.

I turned. The female pit bull appeared from behind a stack of tires, her dark eyes black in the afternoon sunlight. Because of the shredding machine, she was momentarily surprised to see a trespasser only a few yards from where she’d been dozing. The dog stiffened, as if in recognition, and bared her teeth, while her body hunkered lower for traction. I was already backing away when she roared at me and charged.

Attached to the pit bull’s collar was a galvanized chain. But how long? Was the chain anchored? The questions were displaced by panic. I turned and ran. The shock waves of the dog’s barking hammered at my ankles and pushed me faster. Then pushed me high into the air. Before I could understand what had happened, I was crouched on the hood of a car, my eyes affixed to the eyes of the pit bull as she hurled herself at me, her teeth inches from my face.

I threw up an arm and dived toward the roof of the car. When I looked, the dog was still at face level, jaws gnashing, but then she dropped from sight. An instant later, the animal reappeared, bug-eyed with frustration because the chain had stopped her just short of the car. She was jumping, her claws scrabbling against metal, trying to snatch a piece of me before gravity yanked her back to the ground.

I was atop a wrecked car, I realized. Its windshield was shattered, its metal so traumatized by collision, its roof creaked beneath my weight when I got to my knees, then my feet. I looked around, trying to understand what had just happened, while the pit bull barked and leaped and slathered itself into a frenzy. For now, though, I was safe-unless the chain broke. But was there a way to get back to my SUV? Still in shock, I had to think it through methodically.

Yes, there was a way to escape… if I scampered off the trunk of the car and stayed close to the trailer. But the chain’s perimeter circled perilously close to the gate. I was gauging the distance when I remembered the leather organizer I had been carrying. It contained my ID, a pad to take notes, plus a fine Kate Spade billfold that had been given to me by a friend. And… my cell phone!

Damn it. I couldn’t leave all that behind!

I got down on my knees and infuriated the alpha female even more by peering over the side, where I saw weeds and a crumpled Marlboro carton but no leather organizer. That’s when I remembered something else that had been displaced by panic during the last few seconds: someone had switched off the shredding machine… and the gate wasn’t locked.

Where were the people who worked here?

“Hello!” I called tentatively at first, then yelled over the barking of the pit bull, “Who owns this dog?”

I didn’t expect an answer but I got it.

“Same person who owns the goddamn property you’re trespassin’ on!” A bully’s voice that came from the back of the lot. Then the man laughed, “By god, woman, you got some legs on you! You can run, I’ll give you that. But you just cost me ten bucks!”

I stood and searched the junkyard until I found two men, not one, at the back of the lot. Both tall, one skinny, the other man huge, with a massive face beneath a ZZ Top beard of gray and a belly that gave shape to his coveralls. The men had hands on hips and both were chuckling as if they’d shared some private joke while standing near a hill of tires and a machine, the words Moline Industrial Shredder stenciled on a yellow feeding hopper.

I hollered back, “Your dog almost bit me!”

“Good! That’s what she’s paid to do!” It was the bully graybeard. He was lumbering toward me and still laughing as he said to his partner, “Goddamn, most folks’ll jump up on that Chevy every time. Leave it to a woman to choose a Lincoln!”

Hilarious-both men roared.

What were they talking about? I looked around until I understood. Junked cars had been jammed tight into the lot. I could have chosen a rusting Chevy Malibu as refuge, but I had climbed onto the car next to it because it had looked bigger, higher off the ground-a Lincoln, apparently.

I felt my ears warming. “You let a dog attack people, then bet on where they run? You’re the animals!” I yelled.

I was so mad, it must have startled the younger man because he stopped. He stood staring at me for a moment, but then proved it wasn’t my anger that had given him pause. “Hannah…?” he asked, his voice familiar. “God A’mighty, it is you-Hannah Smith! Harris, I know this girl!” The skinny man clapped his hands together, delighted, but then got serious and called to the pit bull, “Vixxy! Get your ass back in the kennel!”

The dog continued leaping at me but finally obeyed when graybeard, the ZZ Top giant, grabbed a chunk of pipe.

When it was safe, I climbed down and said to the skinny man, “Sorry to hear about your mother,” because, despite what had just happened, it was the right thing to say to Mica Helms.

MICA HAD BEEN a tall boy in school but was now six-five, six-six-even he wasn’t sure-but looked taller because his body, instead of filling out, had only stretched longer as he grew, his skin tight on a boney frame that looked to be all elbows and ribs, but with a gaunt face and a set of shoulders that could have made him handsome were it not for the tattoos and the chemical sparking of his eyes.

Crack or meth? I wondered. Oxycodone, painkillers… or something new?

Mica’s nervous chattering, his barks of pointless laughter, made it evident that he was using again. The name of the chemical didn’t matter. His brain was starving. It made him a hunter, his glittering eyes always on the alert for a new source-or a new threat. Those eyes were studying me now as he said, “What if I told you donations to the museum were being kept right here? There’s a building out back-nothing fancy, but it’s safe. Would you keep your mouth shut? New donors might not like their family treasures bein’ stored in a junkyard-just temporary, of course.”

For ten minutes, we had been circling the subject of Fisherfolk Incorporated and I was getting impatient. “Would I tell the police, you mean?”

“The po-lice?” Mica said, making it a two-syllable word. “Why the hell you do that? Honey, I’m on probation. Last thing I’m gonna do is break the law. I don’t remember seeing your old fishing reels, but if your mamma’s stuff is there, I’ll find it.” He paused, patted the shredding machine affectionately, then smiled down at me. “But Harris runs this place. He didn’t like it when those cops come around asking questions about me… when was that, Saturday? He’d like it even less if he knew you was the reason.”

I didn’t care for Mica’s threatening tone. “From the way that dog minded Harris but ignored you,” I said, “maybe they should come back and ask him some questions, too. Is that what you’re making me do? Call police?”

Mica straightened as if insulted, then lowered his voice to say, “Hannah, you always was the world’s most pigheaded girl. Watch what you say around Harris Spooner! My first six months at Raiford, that man showed me how to jail. Baby, you don’t wanna mess with-” He glanced at the trailer where graybeard, in his coveralls, stood watching from the doorway, then gave up, saying, “Hell, you wouldn’t understand. Better to show you.” Mica waved me closer to the shredding machine. “Watch this,” he said, then hit a switch.

I stepped back, not closer, and covered my ears because of the noise. The shredding machine was built on a trailer so it could be towed and had a conveyor belt that led to a rectangular hopper at the top, a yellow box the size of a bathtub. Nothing I could do but stand there while Mica rolled a tire onto the conveyor and then wince when the tire dropped down into the chute. An auger inside the chute rotated the tire like a corkscrew while gradually devouring the thing. The noise, already horrendous, became an ascending scream. Beneath the chute were steel teeth on spindles that rotated in a blur and never slowed while streamers of black rubber, suddenly as light as ribbons, were vented into a metal container. Soon the tire disappeared.

Mica watched me, not the shredder, and his glittering eyes warned It could happen to you.

“Shut it off!” I ordered.

Instead of hitting the switch, he peeked at the ZZ Top giant again, his manner suddenly secretive, then signaled for me to follow as if he didn’t want Spooner to know. So I followed.

Anything was better than standing near that awful machine-or so I believed until I was told how the man with the gray beard, Harris Spooner, had disposed of his late wife.