The Last Child

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The old station wagon coasted to a halt on a bent strip of narrow black. The road was empty, a dark, lonely stretch beyond the edge of town, bracketed by forest and quiet. Johnny eyed the house, where dim light pushed out from one of the windows. Two weeks had passed since the last time he was here, but the same vehicles rusted under the same trees, the same beer can balanced on the mailbox.

The house itself was a bare hint: a yellow gleam and a collection of hard edges that didn’t seem to line up properly. A rotten-sweet poison seeped in from the dump a mile away. In daylight, the crows flocked and a distant gun barked as the junkman shot rats and cans. At night, the crickets called; but sometimes, for no reason, they fell silent. It was as if the world suddenly closed its mouth. Johnny always froze in that silence, and the air around him felt breathless and cold. Johnny dreamed of that sensation more than he cared to admit, but still he came.

Midnight. Dawn.

Six times.

A dozen.

Burton Jarvis was on the list because he was a recidivist. That was the biggest word Johnny knew: it meant, sick motherfucker likely to do it again. He was a registered sex offender who made his money stuffing gut-shot deer and hauling refuse on a flatbed trailer. His nickname was Jar, as in: “Look at the size of this freaking buck, Jar. Think you can stuff one that big?”

Jar didn’t have what Johnny would consider friends, but a few men came by more than once. They passed computer discs between filthy palms and made small talk about how Thailand was still the best place to get laid. Johnny had found those men, too. Where they lived. Where they worked.

They were on his list.

One guy came more than the others. Sometimes he had a gun, and sometimes not. Tall and wiry and old, he had eager, shiny eyes and long fingers. He and Jar drank liquor from the same bottle and talked about stuff they’d done outside some village in Vietnam. They got all smoke-eyed when they talked about a girl they called Small Yellow. They’d spent three days with her in a strafed-out hut full of her dead family. Small Yellow, they’d say, bottle going up, one head shaking. Fucking shame.

Their laughter was not nice at all.

It took Johnny two trips to become suspicious about the shed behind Jar’s house. It sat at the end of a narrow footpath through dense trees, hidden from the road and from the house. The walls were cinder block, the windows nailed shut and packed tight with pink insulation and black plastic. Johnny could not see in. Light never came out. The lock was half the size of Johnny’s head.

That’s where he went first.

The shed.